15 July 2026

What did women want?

In the early-modern period, as in our own, the category of “woman” could take many shapes

Illustration by Dror Cohen

“History is good at the particular,” writes Erin Maglaque, a scholar of early modern Europe. Particularity about the past is certainly the outstanding virtue of her book Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body. Armed with impressive erudition and a sharp eye for the telling anecdote, Maglaque accumulates a massive collection of details about women’s lives across three centuries (1500-1800 CE) and several western European regions. She shows us women labouring (in both senses of the word), desiring, dying and tending to the dead; making milk and cloth; defending themselves against witchcraft accusations; having, losing, and aborting pregnancies.

Some of the stories she has unearthed approach the haunting and timeless status of folklore – such as that of Marie-Joseph Dahl, a late-18th-century farm worker in rural Brittany who falls in love with her boss’s son. Dahl makes a deal with her boss that if she reaps an entire wheat field alone in three days, she can marry her beloved. She succeeds in performing this Herculean feat, but the father reneges. The betrayed woman refuses food for 11 years, surviving only because the farmer breaks her teeth in order to force feed her water and honey. At her best, Maglaque recounts tribulations such as Dahl’s without judgement or lamentation; under her almost clinical treatment, their particularity shines.

At some point, details must be tied together in one way or another, and the device Maglaque has chosen to tie Presence together is less an argument or even a story about the past than a first-person perspective in the present. Maglaque relates early modern women’s history to her own bodily experiences, moving between past and present food preparation, sex, birth, abortion and death. Like many historians, Maglaque finds that archival details jump out to her because she has felt something similar, or something tellingly alien, in her own life; unlike most, she includes these moments of identification in the finished text.

This approach yields some striking moments of insight. Maglaque compares her experience of the contemporary moralisation of breastfeeding children oneself with the more pragmatic early modern attitude. Women of means did not breastfeed their babies, but rather hired a wet nurse to do it for them for pay – meaning, as Maglaque puts it, that “everyone knew the value of breastfeeding because breastfeeding was assigned a waged value”.

When, in the 18th century, the tides turned against wet nursing, women had to be convinced that breastfeeding their babies was something they wanted to do. With stories like these, Maglaque teaches us that even the most seemingly natural aspects of life could have been arranged differently; our experiences, too, are historical and thus potentially transient.

The first person serves Maglaque well as an efficient means of comparing the early modern period with the present. The thread of the author’s perspective also helps to unify a body of material that is diverse, if not diffuse. But as serviceable as the first person may be as a structuring element, it also brings fresh challenges of style. If history is good at particulars, no character is more difficult to make particular than oneself. We don’t receive ourselves as scattered archival traces, effortfully discovered. About the self, we have, on the contrary, too much information – the self is a seamless infinity of details, unified for us by a sensation of consciousness inaccessible to everyone else. A first-person writer has to reduce and unify. If the historian needs to amass facts, the personal essayist needs to cut them, often ruthlessly, stripping away the inessential and the general until all that’s left is a singular and piercing image.

To achieve a first-person style is very difficult, almost unfairly so – in the way that the requirements for an operatic soprano are unfair. Writers who can do it seem uncanny, like Delphic oracles of the self; they are unsparing, like Annie Ernaux; owlishly perceptive, like Rachel Cusk; twisted, like Nathalie Léger; or idiosyncratic, like the Maggie Nelson of Bluets – a collection of fragments by a writer who says she is in love with the colour blue. Many lazy criticisms are levelled at first-person writing: it’s self-absorbed navel-gazing, or it results from a cowardly refusal to systematise, to make knowledge general. The assumption underlying these criticisms seems to be that anyone can write a personal essay, but most people have the work ethic to do something harder. But if we engage with this genre on the level of style, then we’ll have to admit a more painful truth: writing the self is extremely difficult. What would seem to be the birthright of everyone is in fact accessible only to a few.

Maglaque’s first-person writing is not quite at the level of her historical writing. She is unsentimental and specific about the past; her personal writing is all too often long on feeling and short on particulars. The authorial persona who declares of a manual of medical plants, “I love the lists of herbs. I imagine them growing in gardens, by roadsides, in meadows,” is somehow less lifelike than the one who stands back and calmly reports the harrowing fact that doctors were commonly asked to prise open the mouths of women who died in childbirth, on the theory that air entering their lungs would keep the dead baby alive long enough to be baptised. Even when the experiences Maglaque describes are more heightened, such as an abortion, her first-person style does not match the vividness of her historical writing. The gods, as Elizabeth Hardwick once commented, do not grant every gift.

But if the first-person allows Maglaque to draw our attention to the contingent nature of women’s experiences of reproduction and labour in the present, then it has nonetheless achieved something important. Presence does not exactly arrive at an overarching argument about women’s bodies in the early modern period, but it does offer us a clear picture of how apparently natural functions – sex, birth, death – were once organised differently from how they are in Maglaque’s own experience today. Maglaque gives us the details we need to reconstruct a world often startlingly dissimilar to our own.

Some of these details are politically resonant. She makes the thought-provoking point, based on research by historians of sexuality, that for much early modern sex outside of marriage, penetration was marginal, one possible activity among many – whereas by the 18th century, “penetrative sex was the norm”. If, as Maglaque notes, many heterosexual couples are still organised along 18th-century lines, it’s galvanising to be reminded that there’s nothing timeless or inevitable about that.

Even details of early modern women’s lives that do not seem so readily applicable are nonetheless aerating. Most of us aren’t likely to begin working in a dairy or spinning thread for linen shifts – and if the occasional tradwife does go there, the results hardly seem liberating. Yet to learn of women’s association with milking and laundering, or to be reminded of the institution of the spinning bee, a female-dominated space of work, talk and sexual liaison, is to see that the category of “woman” could take another shape – one that probably seemed just as natural, and inescapable, as our version of the word can sometimes seem today.

Most uncanny of all, it’s hard to tell whether the differences or the similarities predominate. As midwives delivered babies, so women predominate among medical staff on maternity wards. Women nursed then and now. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Emily Ogden is a critic and the author of the forthcoming book Darkness Becomes Bright: The Haunted Life (and Afterlife) of Edgar Allan Poe, published by Picador

Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body
Erin Maglaque
Jonathan Cape, 336pp, £25

Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops

[Further reading: Which god does JD Vance kneel to?]