Why read Sex in an Old Regime City?

Book cover of Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660-1789

Book description

Our ideas about the long histories of young couples' relationships and women's efforts to manage their reproductive health are often premised on the notion of a powerful sexual double standard.

In Sex in an Old Regime City, Julie Hardwick offers a major reframing of the history of young people's intimacy.…

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European history

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Why read it?

1 author picked Sex in an Old Regime City as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Kathleen Wellman

Author

This book brings to light the intimate relationships of ordinary young men and women as opposed to those of powerful, public women. While royal women endured contemporary surveillance of their sexuality, pregnancies, and childbirths, the intimate lives of ordinary women must be wrested from archival records. Harwick’s exploration of legal records concerning unmarried pregnant women reveals the various range of strategies they adopted as well as the extensive support, both emotional and financial, they received from their community—clergy, lawyers, midwives, parents, etc.—to the benefit of both mother and child. Such support may well have reduced child abandonment and infanticide.

Hardwick…

From Kathleen's list on women in early modern France.