“As Long as the Absence Shall Last”: Proxy Agreements and Women's Power in Eighteenth-Century Quebec City

Résumé 0

In pre-industrial societies, the exercise of power within the family was closely linked to the legal context and to patriarchal norms. The role played by women, particularly married women, in the family’s economic activity is often hidden from history. The study of women entitled to act by proxy in Quebec City, the capital of Nouvelle-France in the eighteenth century, allows a better understanding of the way the couple could function in a colonial context often characterized by the physical absence of males. The analysis of agreements authorizing wives to stand proxy for their husbands, combined with a prosopographical study, reveals the context and the issues at stake in this circumstantial transfer of power. This approach shows that it is possible to penetrate, at least in part, the silence of history concerning the activity of married women, and to shed light on the complex question of complementarity and trust within the couple.