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Weep Not for Me - Women, Ballads, and Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland (Paperback)
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Weep Not for Me - Women, Ballads, and Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland (Paperback)
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Ballad singing has long been one of the most powerful expressions
of Scottish culture. For hundreds of years, women in Scotland have
sung of heroines who are strong, arrogant, canny--the very opposite
of the bourgeois stereotype of the good, maternal woman. In Weep
Not for Me, Deborah Symonds explores the social world that gave
rise to both the popular ballad heroine and her maternal
counterpart. The setting is the Scottish countryside in the
eighteenth century--a crucial period in Scotland's history, for it
witnessed the country's union with England, the Enlightenment, and
the flowering of letters. But there were also great economic
changes as late-feudal Scotland hurried into capitalist agriculture
and textile production. Ballad singing reflected many of these
developments. In the ballads, marriage is rare and lovers murder
each other, haunted by premarital pregnancy, incest, and
infanticide, while relatives argue over dowries. These problems
were not fiction. The women in this study lived and died in a
period when hopes of marriage and landholding were replaced by the
reality of wage labor and disintegrating households. Using these
ballads, together with court records of women tried for
infanticide, Symonds makes fascinating points about the shifting
meaning of womanhood in the eighteenth century, the roles of
politically astute lawyers in that shift, and the significance of
ballad singing as a response. She also discusses the political
implications of Walter Scott's infanticide novel, The Heart of
Mid-Lothian, for women and for the ballad heroine. While some
historians have argued that women's history has little to do with
the watershed events of textbook history, Symondsconvincingly shows
us that the democratic and economic revolutions of the late
eighteenth century were just as momentous for women as for men,
even if their effects on women were quite different. Deborah A.
Symonds is Associate Professor of History at Drake University.
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