Mary S. Hartman. The Household and the Making of History: A
Subversive View of the Western Past. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004. xi + 297 pp. $70.00 (cloth), ISBN
978-0-521-82972-4; $25.99 (paper), ISBN 978-0-521-53669-1.
Reviewed by Christopher Corley (Department of History, Minnesota
State University, Mankato) Published on H-Women (November, 2006)
The Rise of the West? Late Marriage for Women as the Key to An
Invisible Paradigm Good historical syntheses of women's and
family history show us what history looks like with their
subjects at the center rather than at the margins of the story,
but great syntheses suggest that our vision of history might not
ever be the same. Mary S. Hartman, a long-time advocate of
women's history and feminist politics, and a founding member of
the Berkshire Conference of the History of Women, has provided
us with just such a rare work of scholarship. When historians
are drawn to important problems, such as explaining the rise of
the West, they generally refer studen