Women's Agency: Then and Now

This article surveys recent thinking about agency as a concept, both in general and within women's and gender history, and then discusses some of the ways in which women's agency has figured in early modern cultural and economic history over the last several decades. It considers whether women's agency might have been a matter of norms as well as actions, that is, whether people expected women to be capable, economically productive, qualified, and skilled while simultaneously ascribing to patriarchal norms about women's weakness. It highlights several research areas in which women's agency has been a particularly important theme in recent scholarship and examines arguments about women's and girls' agency that have emerged in debates about the role of women's work in European economic expansion. At the end, it briefly connects early modern developments with some trends in women's lives that have emerged because of the COVID pandemic.