SISTERS TOGETHER - WOMEN WITHOUT MEN IN 17TH-CENTURY FRENCH VILLAGE CULTURE

It is often assumed that the institution of the family and all that im plied in terms of patriarchal power, settlement patterns, and inherita nce customs restricted women within village communities. This article sets out to explore the possibility that there were female-centered ho useholds in seventeenth-century France, based on sibling relationships , that these households did not require male suzerainty, and that they may have survived in village communities with the support of female n etworks operating through the evening spinning bees. The article focus es on texts that represent a legal dispute over a village fire in Norm andy toward the end of the seventeenth century and on the complex ways in which male voices in these texts constituted the lives of the fema le villagers involved.