A sad fact from Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King, a book by Antonia Fraser: “Estimates of the number of women who could actually sign their own name in this period vary between 34 and 15 percent” (page 43). No source listed, otherwise I would like to track down each estimate to see how they came to it.
And yet today, so many women waste their time reading nothing but repetitious women’s magazines that promote wanton materialism, self-hate and ridiculous stereotypes. End rant.
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I’d bet the primary source documents that drive these literacy estimates are marriage registers. You can envision some poor grad student dutifully visiting every parish in a province, jotting down the number of full signatures and X’s in the records.
Actually, that sounds like a pretty fun summer.
Comment by Ryan Cousineau 04.11.12 @ 5:00 amSounds like a ridiculously fun job, Ryan. We have a loan of a 1920-26 marriage register where they save future researchers the trouble by having a field for responses as to whether the groom can read and whether the bride can read.
Comment by maktaaq 04.12.12 @ 8:28 pmLeave a comment
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