Death before Birth: Fetal Health and Mortality in Historical Perspective Book

I had been an ardent fan of a novel series while in elementary school; faux diaries of genuine regal girls. The series was accurate in its portrayal of the pressures that tradition and marriage placed upon princesses, but it was European-centered, and it too often depicted idyll existences. Servants of the Dynasty, I was afraid, would be the same, and was relieved to find it a refreshingly realistic portrait of palace women's lives.

The editor, Anne Walthall, gathered an impressively wide selection of pieces, which dealt with royalty in the Ottoman Empire to Mayan Courts to northern Nigeria to Versailles. I was happy that the anthology did not merely deal with European royalty, but also focused attention alternately on Asian, African, and South American palace life, while being sure to include analyses of non-royals - such as Ottoman concubines and slaves and Chinese entertainers. Media and school curricula focus a great deal on upper class, White views of history, and these all-inclusive perspectives were both uplifting and necessary.

The individual authors, a majority of them female, are to be congratulated in finding hope in the most dismal of situations. One essay, in particular, discusses Russia's Ivan IV's seven wives, of which three died (one didn't live through the wedding celebrations) and three others were forced into convents. His son, later killed by Ivan IV, lived long enough to marry thrice, his wives also tonsured. The essay goes on to discuss the key relationships to the tsar and other nobles that royal nuns maintained and exploited, such as highlighting blood ties in requests for land and money.

It was refreshing (to a disheartened feminist) to read about women's independence and power through their own industriousness instead of their relationships to men - such as cloth-weaving by Aztec women, which was then used as a direct form of currency (a practice and way of life that ended with the advent of Spanish colonialism), and the women-controlled indigo dyeing industry in northern Nigeria before it was wrested by men. The anthology succeeded in breaking down countless popular misconceptions, clarifying harem to mean a sacred space that more accurately refers to Mecca than a man's exotic sexual fantasy and illuminating the power many concubines boasted in political affairs by networking through relatives and slaves and proximity to the sultan. But the collection of essays made clear the deplorable status of even the most privileged of women, all living in unapologetically patriarchal societies.

Though when I started reading I expected lighter fare, Servants of the Dynasty is to be applauded in bringing together sophisticated academic articles that are at the same time easily understandable to those with no scholastic background on the subject. I, as might be expected, would have liked some discussion of lesbians from a book that boasts inclusion of a wide array of women, but nonetheless happily encourage all feminists to peruse this anthology, and can happily allow my copy to take its place on the shelf reserved for my childhood's beloved princess series.

Review by Ilinca Popescu