Aries's great insight was to grasp that childhood itself is a socially constructed role, a state that societies invent and continually re-invent.

Theories of social construction have been much elaborated since Aries wrote, but I was hoping we wouldn't much immerse in the academics of the theory here, only in what we know of the concrete social history of women, a topic that came up as thread drift over here.

In that thread, Fed summarized for us what I believe to be a highly suspect history of women through the (many) ages of Western European history. I can speak to it - and did - mainly as a student of the C17 and C18 in Britain, France, German, and Italy, the main centres of what we now call the Enlightenment, a time when women of some classes enjoyed unprecedented liberties and when others managed to de-class themselves in unprecedented ways, unmatched since, in fact, until our own times, although still only in the West.

Because I had picked out only one detail of Fed's original omni-summary, she responded by reasserting what she knows of another detail, the status of women in Western Europe during what we loosely call the Middle Ages. I felt I should respond to that post here.

It certainly comes as no news at all to any historian that popular views of the European Middle Ages, demonized since the Enlightenment as the "Dark Ages," have been caricatures. Common sense tells us that so many societies persisting and evolving through such a long period cannot have been the cartoons that some C18 rationalist-propagandists may have enjoyed spreading - and anyone who has read much of Voltaire, eg, knows that he knew he was writing caricatures, although for what he believed was a good purpose.

I have not read Régine Pernoud, but from what I can see of the reviews that Fed is quoting, this must be a fairly late debunking of the myth of the "Dark Ages" - in other words, we're looking at some straw-women here.

I am not a mediaevalist, although I've worked with some good ones. From all I know, the status of women in Western Europe through the feudal period still depended most heavily on class: the daughters of aristocrats, as always, became both literate and skilled in craftwork, although they were also most valuable to their fathers and husbands as property. These were the ages of kingdom-building in Europe, so advantageous marriages became a strategy as valuable as war in securing and acquiring land and power.

One other class of women indeed flourished during the Middle Ages in some parts of Western Europe. In the guild towns, the larger market towns, everyone flourished because of the economic structure of those towns. Their government was based upon the local skilled trades and crafts, organized into guilds, and anyone who could do the work was welcome. Many of those workers, men and women both, became more than artisans, became true artists, as did many of the daughters of the aristocracy, and all honour to them.

The guild towns tended also, of course, to be cathedral towns (in Britain, "royal boroughs," no matter how small, as long as there was a cathedral), and as faithful Catholics, the burghers of course played out much of their public lives on the steps of that magnificently expensive structure (see miracle plays, mystery plays).

But it was not the Church that determined the social organization of that minority of blessed people - and it is important to note that they were a minority. Through the feudal ages, the vast majority of Europeans, men and women both, lived in miserable poverty as serfs, and it would be obscene of any Christian apologist to claim otherwise now.

RC apologists should also be brought to account for the suppression of the Celtic Catholic church in Britain in the late Middle Ages. But there would be a major digression, way beyond the concerns only of women. After all, the Celtic church had few problems with sex, and all the priests married freely.

Actually, the Middle Ages were demonized in the Enlightenment, then resanctified by the Romantics.
Since the 1820s, there have been many attempts to claim that the Middle Ages were more "organic" communitarian, or natural, and to oppose that vision to the unnatural, calculating Enlightenment, or even Renaissance.

I agree with Skdadl that both were caricatures. It is really hard to speak of such vast questions as "women in the Middle Ages" (a thousand years in twenty countries) or "Individualism in the Enlightment". Much more targetted discussions have a better opportuinity to shed light, I think.