Postscript: New trajectories
Spoiler Notice
This postscript reflects on the book’s broader historical themes and does not reveal specific details of earlier chapters’ stories.
Summary
Adams opens the postscript by recalling his earlier claim that the Age of Enlightenment launched a new trajectory for women’s history. He marks 1678, when Elena Piscopia became the first woman to earn a PhD at Padua University, as an early sign. By the late eighteenth century, women intellectuals and scientists—such as mathematician Émilie du Châtelet, artist Anne Vallayer-Coster, and historian Catherine Macaulay—had become prominent voices. Adams notes that women also distinguished themselves as printers, naturalists, astronomers, translators, and textbook authors. He references his own work The Prometheans, where he explored the careers of revolutionary figures like Charlotte Corday, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Mary Somerville, Germaine de Staël, and Caroline Norton. These women formed a new cultural elite whose achievements were grounded in talent rather than rank, and they laid the foundations for women’s higher education and suffrage.
Shifting from celebrated figures to ordinary lives, Adams describes his excavation work in the Spitalfields crypt, where hundreds of lead coffins preserved the mortal remains of Londoners from around 1720 onward. Women were interred in numbers equal to men, and their bones told stories of childbirth, arthritis, marriage, profession, immigration, and social mobility. The most fundamental and unassuming change Adams identifies across that burial period is the dramatic reduction in infant mortality at the turn of the nineteenth century. Women bore fewer children, and far more survived to adulthood. He closes by suggesting that this single statistic encapsulates the new trajectory in women’s history.
Key Events
- 1678: Elena Piscopia becomes the first woman to receive a PhD, graduating from Padua University.
- Late eighteenth century: Women intellectuals and scientists—Émilie du Châtelet, Anne Vallayer-Coster, Catherine Macaulay—rise to prominence during the Enlightenment.
- Late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries: Women gain visibility as publishers, naturalists, astronomers, translators, and educational writers.
- Revolutionary era: In The Prometheans, Adams profiles radical women including Charlotte Corday, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Mary Somerville, Germaine de Staël, and Caroline Norton, showing their independence from inherited social rank.
- Foundations for reform: The work of these Enlightenment women helps pave the way for women’s colleges and the suffrage movement in the twentieth century.
- c. 1720–1870: The Spitalfields crypt burials document urban women’s lives, revealing morbidity, occupational patterns, and migration.
- Turn of the nineteenth century: Infant mortality drops significantly; women have fewer children, and child survival rates improve—an emblematic turning point for women’s history.
Character Development
Because this postscript is a retrospective survey, it does not develop individual characters in the narrative sense. Instead, it traces the collective trajectory of women from isolated pioneers in the late seventeenth century to a recognizable cultural elite by the early nineteenth century. Elena Piscopia represents the exceptional woman breaching institutional barriers. The Enlightenment figures—du Châtelet, Vallayer-Coster, Macaulay—exemplify intellectual and artistic authority gained through personal merit. The later radicals (Wollstonecraft, Somerville, de Staël, Norton, and others) show how such authority translated into political and social influence that transcended class. The unnamed women of the Spitalfields crypt round out the picture: their skeletal evidence reminds readers that the new trajectory was not solely about famous names but about measurable, widespread changes in health, family size, and survival that touched countless ordinary lives.
Themes, Symbols, or Motifs
- The Enlightenment as a watershed: The chapter treats the Enlightenment as the inflection point where women began to participate in public intellectual life on terms that would eventually lead to formal rights and education.
- Mortality and demography as a feminist lens: Adams uses the infant-mortality statistic not just as a medical fact but as a symbol of women’s shifting relationship with reproduction and autonomy. Fewer births and more surviving children signal a fundamental change in the female life-course.
- Archaeology and everyday lives: The Spitalfields crypt serves as a motif for the hidden, domestic histories that complement the grand narratives of prominent women. The lead coffins preserve evidence of arthritis and childbirth, making tangible the physical costs of pre-modern women’s lives.
- From exception to elite: The chapter traces the change from singularly exceptional women (Piscopia) to a cohort of women whose careers were no longer freakish anomalies, then to a mass phenomenon in which ordinary women’s families were reshaped by demographic transition.
Why This Chapter Matters
Functioning as a coda for the entire book, this postscript connects the long arc of “unquiet women” from the dusk of the Roman Empire to the dawn of the Enlightenment with the modern era it foreshadows. By naming the key women ahead of the suffrage and university movements, Adams makes the case that the foundations for twentieth-century feminism were laid precisely by the women who seized new professional and intellectual roles in the 1700s. The archaeological detail from Spitalfields grounds that argument in material evidence, showing that the transformation was not merely anecdotal but measurable in bones and burial registers. The postscript thus turns the reader’s gaze forward, suggesting that the stories told in earlier chapters were part of a momentum that would eventually reshape society on an everyday scale.
Study Questions and Answers
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What concrete indicator does Adams highlight as the most fundamental change in women’s fortunes during the long eighteenth century?
He points to the dramatic decline in infant mortality, accompanied by women bearing fewer children and far more of those children surviving to adulthood. This demographic shift symbolizes a new trajectory in women’s history that improved life expectancy and autonomy. -
How does Adams link the careers of Enlightenment women to later feminist movements?
He describes women like Mary Somerville, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Germaine de Staël as members of a new cultural elite whose achievements were based on talent rather than inherited rank. Their prominence in science, letters, and politics laid the groundwork for the establishment of women’s colleges and the push for women’s suffrage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. -
What do the Spitalfields burials reveal about ordinary women that the biographies of famous women cannot?
The skeletal remains and coffin plates document the everyday realities of urban women—frequent childbirth, chronic arthritis, trade occupations, migration patterns, and social mobility. This physical evidence shows that the broad-based improvement in maternal and infant health was a mass phenomenon, not limited to the literate elite.