Cohen, Elizabeth

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

Comptes rendus / Book Reviews 521sons and networking. Owners, staff, and liquor board officials were aware of thepresence of gays and lesbians in specific hotels, but the issue did not become public.By the late 1940s, as public drinking became more respectable, pressures mountedfor greater diversity in liquor licensing, with clubs being licensed in 1947. Duringthis period the city had a vibrant nightlife. The problem of bottle clubs (unlicensedcabarets) and a new knowledge of alcohol based on the acceptability of middle-class drinking led to the creation (with much controversy) of cocktail bars in 1954,ending the beer parlours monopoly on public drinking. That year, parlours werereclassified as public houses in an attempt to define away the image of working-class excess. Middle-class drinking of cocktails (also in hotels) was portrayed as aform of consumption that promoted relaxation and social interaction (p. 110), notthe guilty beer guzzling of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.Campbells book is scholarly yet accessible and not overloaded with theoreticalor historiographical detail (although Foucault pops up in the conclusion). Missing orunderdeveloped issues include the connection of beer parlours to political patron-age, corruption (beyond the role of breweries), and organized crime, perennials inVancouver municipal and provincial politics. Although not tasked with direct regu-lation of the parlours, the municipal police were the primary social control agency inVancouvers downtown, and their records could have been consulted in more detail.It also would be useful to fit beer parlour drinking into the larger framework of pro-vincial liquor policy. Retail sale for off-premise consumption also was governed byclass, racial and gender attitudes, and official attitudes toward proper behaviour.In the end, it was not the cocktail bar but a rising standard of living and the homethat undercut the tavern. Liquor stores and expanding consumer purchasing powerwere not unrelated to the declining relative importance of beer parlours. In Ontarioin the early 1950s, for example, more than a third of all alcohol was sold in taverns,bars, and restaurants; by the late 1970s on-premise sales had declined to only lessthan a fifth.Greg MarquisUniversity of New Brunswick Saint JohnMonica Chojnacka  Working Women of Early Modern Venice. Baltimore and Lon-don: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.In a slim, but very welcome volume, Monica Chojnacka musters into the limelightthe frequently overlooked working women of early modern Italy. The pre-modernwomen who appear in most sources and then in historical studies are usually mem-bers of social and religious elites. Furthermore, the literature for Italy often down-plays the role of women as workers, since, by comparison with northern Europe,they are strikingly less visible in regulated or paid employment. Chojnackas focuson non-elite urban women, specifically the popolane of Venice from 1540 to 1630,therefore moves us toward a fuller picture. The attention to ordinary women alsoallows her to challenge a general belief, based largely on studies of fifteenth-centuryFlorentine elites, that patriarchy radically deprived Italian women of mobility and522 Histoire sociale / Social History, vol. xxxv, no 70 (2002)agency. Chojnacka acknowledges that ordinary women, like their social betters,faced gendered constraints, but suggests that those limitations worked differently onwomen of higher and lower rank. Instead of suffering seclusion and utter impotence,she contends, popolane women moved about  within and beyond the city  andexercised social power ... the ability to make independent decisions as well as toinfluence the actions of other people (p. xvi). She seeks a balance that recognizesboth womens vulnerability and their capacity to act. This sensible argument finds asympathetic ear from others of us who study women in various parts of Italy.Rather than organizing her study, as have many historians of women, around lifestages, Chojnacka has chosen interestingly to map instead a social geography. Thechapters begin with a focus on women in their households and then expand outwardin concentric circles to neighbourhood, city, and region. Within each zone, she con-siders patterns of behaviour characteristic of single women, wives, and widows, butshe emphasizes commonalities of experience. In the introduction the author com-ments that broad historical factors were reshaping Venetian life in this period  inparticular, the evolving economy of manufactures that brought new kinds of jobsand the intellectual and institutional innovations arising in the wake of the Catholicreformation. Yet the books major concern is to chart the everyday dealings of earlymodern women rather than to track or explain larger patterns of change. A section ofillustrations, with elaborate captions but few dates, complements this approach.To develop her thesis about ordinary womens social power, Chojnacka assemblesa rich medley of archival sources  extensive in their variety, though in someinstances limited in their numbers. While she begins with an elaborated anecdoteabout Paolina and Pollonia, two sisters on their own who seek protection from theospedale of the Derelitti, Chojnacka does not use the techniques of microhistory andthick description. For each topic she draws on a different mix of sources, in mostcases finding clusters of examples from which to explicate the theme. An exceptionis the first chapter on household and residence, which emerges from a quantitativestudy of nearly 20,000 hearths registered in 47 parish censuses dating mostly to the1590s. These valuable records yield a range of patterns of male- and female-headedhouseholds, the latter often gathered geographically as if for mutual support.Chojnacka remarks on the relative independence of nuclear families from their kin,a northern pattern that contrasts with more extended family structures often pos-ited for other parts of the peninsula.The rest of the chapters work more anecdotally from a shifting array of docu-ments. Using tax rolls, petitions for relief from financial obligations, leases, andother notarial contracts, chapter 2 examines womens property and income. Chapter3 draws especially on a selection of Inquisition trials to explore neighbourhood andmeanings of social identity. Chapter 4 looks at women migrants to Venice using tri-bunal records, again in a mix with parish censuses and a handful of dowry contracts.Chapter 5 enlarges on the theme of mobility as women travelled outside their neigh-bourhoods and even outside the city. Concerning mobile women, Chojnacka wantsto argue both distinctness from the native-born and integration. Chapter 6 changescourse; based in the records of four custodial institutions for girls in need andwomen in trouble, it elaborates on the networks that linked elite and ordinaryComptes rendus / Book Reviews 523women across geography and class. Her emphasis points away from a Foucauldianpreoccupation with discipline and toward a view of institutions as potentially pro-tective and even empowering.The book offers strong thematic continuities, as mobility and agency penetrate avariety of womens activities. Of particular interest are sociability and work.Chojnacka develops a fresh sense of the complex texture of relationships with menand with other women that shaped popolane lives. In making the case for significantfemale management of property, she highlights the seldom examined importance ofsiblings  sisters and brothers. Rather than assuming that male dominance is thewhole story, she proposes for womens dealings with men a model of collaborationand, in a few situations, even friendship. At the same time, ordinary women didspend much of their time with other women. Chojnacka strikingly depicts neigh-bourhoods where men and high-status women were largely absent from the streets,and popolane engaged with their peers in daily rounds of social and economic activ-ities. Womens work typically occurred here, for most an improvisational motley oftasks and exchanges rather than a job or a career. By implication, work identity liesdeeply enmeshed in broader social connections. Chojnacka explores femalemoney-making where she can, but inherited assets loom larger than earnings orbusiness profits. Despite the books title, womens work remains somewhat elusive.All told, one of the great merits of the study is Chojnackas inventive and patientdeployment of diverse sources. At the same time, because the data are richer onsome matters than others, at points the patchwork feels a bit uneven. Perhapsbecause so many kinds of documents are in play, some readings assume too muchtransparency. The impact of law and genre on language and representation demandsa steadier eye, and arguments from omission or negation sometimes presume anoverly close equation between text and world. For example, a male habit of demur-ral in witchcraft trials need not betoken mens general absence from neighbourhoodaffairs. Nonetheless, Chojnacka succeeds in drawing for Venice a more nuancedportrait of popolane womens lives than we have yet had for any other Italian city.Her accumulated results point toward a significant adjustment of our understandingof gender in the peninsula. Many ordinary women did circulate within and beyondtheir city, and they did participate in shaping their own well-being and that of theirfamilies and neighbours.Elizabeth CohenYork UniversityEnda Delaney  Demography, State and Society: Irish Migration to Britain, 1921–1971. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2000. Pp. xvi,345.This text is a welcome addition both to McGill-Queens Studies in Ethnic Historyand to the historiography of Irish emigration. It is particularly encouraging to seesuch a well-researched, carefully argued monograph highlighting the vital impor-

Monica Chojnacka — Working Women of Early Modern Venice

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Monica Chojnacka — Working Women of Early Modern Venice

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)