Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the 19th Century Book

In Ladies of the Leisure Class, Bonnie G. Smith describes the life of bourgeois women in the North region of France in the nineteenth century. The book is divided in seven main chapters, each one covering a different dimension of women's lives, including their relationship to work and men, sexuality and reproduction, religion, society and the poor, education, and literature. Smith's analysis of each of these dimensions reveals a major trend throughout the century: that of an increasingly strict division of roles between men and women, in parallel with the rise of 'domesticity', a notion essentially confining women to the private sphere of the home and the family.

The duality between the "productive role" of men and the "reproductive role" of women is at the very heart of Smith's book. The author sees it as essential to understand several aspects of women's lives, including the importance of motherhood, faith and education.

The work of Bonnie G. Smith is an impressive piece of research for several reasons. First, it is extremely well documented. The author studies several families of the Nord over many generations based on a wide array of sources: personal correspondence, political and business treatises, local archives, memoirs, novels, as well as interviews with descendants of the women cited in the research.

Second, it is a great illustration of the contribution of women's history to a better understanding of the past. In the absence of "any great individual consciously acting in the public arena", she decides to study women as a "social group whose private way of life proceeded outside previous standards of historical significance" (p. 15).

Third, Smith's work has the merit of calling upon other disciplines than history, including sociology and psychology.

In fact, this tendency to resort to psychology and biology is both a strength and a weakness in Smith's analysis. Chapter 4 on "The Rhetoric of Reproduction" in particular, is less convincing that the other Chapters of the book due to the over-emphasis on biological factors underlying women's condition. Some of the symbolic interpretations made by the author seem a little far-fetched, such as when she interprets women's taste for floral motives in clothes and interior decoration as a way to express "their closeness to the natural world" (p. 81).
Stating that women were "at nature's call" (p. 57) or that "the daily activities of the Northern bourgeoise brought her close to nature" (p. 65) also seems a little exaggerated. Bourgeois women typically 'outsourced' some biological functions to their servants, such as breast-feeding infants or caring for the sick. Their confinement in the home and urban lifestyle, involving the pursuit of leisure activities such as music, reading, or embroidery, can in fact be considered artificial rather than "natural".

Finally, Smith goes very far in describing the antagonism between men and women within the bourgeoisie. Her insistence on the ideological differences between the sexes lacks a reflection on the intellectual exchanges and shared values between husbands and wives, mothers and sons.