Peruse Servants Of The Dynasty: Palace Women In World History Documented By Anne Walthall In Physical Edition

academic study of the various roles women encompass within a monarchy/empire, It examines not only the normal bag of positions servants, ladies in waiting, concubines, etc but also how those roles are varied and shaped by their individual culture's traditions.
It covers a wide spectrum, region wise, and would have been very easy to paint them all with a single broad stroke Walthall avoids this trap.
The depth and level of research that must have been done is impressive, Five all around. Mothers, wives, concubines, entertainers, attendants, officials, maids, drudges, By offering the first comparative view of the women who lived, worked, and served in royal courts around the globe, this work opens a new perspective on the monarchies that have dominated much of human history.
Written by

leading historians, anthropologists, and archeologists, these lively essays take us from Mayan states to twentiethcentury Benin in Nigeria, to the palace of Japanese Shoguns, the Chinese Imperial courts, eighteenthcentury Versailles, Mughal India, and beyond.
Together they investigate how women's roles differed, how their roles changed over time, and how their histories can illuminate the structures of power and societies in which they lived.
This work also furthers our understanding of how royal courts, created to project the authority of male rulers, maintained themselves through the reproductive and productive powers of women.
I had been an ardent fan of a novel series while in elementary school faux diaries of genuine regal girls, The series was accurate in its portrayal of the pressures that tradition and marriage placed upon princesses, but it was Europeancentered, and it too often depicted idyll existences.
Servants of the Dynasty, I was afraid, would be the same, and was relieved to find it a refreshingly realistic portrait of palace womens lives.


The editor, Anne Walthall, gathered an impressively wide selection of pieces, which dealt with royalty in the Ottoman Empire to Mayan Courts to northern Nigeria to Versailles.
I was happy that the anthology did not merely deal with European royalty, but also focused attention alternately on Asian, African, and South American palace life, while being sure to include analyses of nonroyals such as Ottoman concubines and slaves and Chinese entertainers.
Media and school curricula focus a great deal on upper class, White views of history, and these allinclusive perspectives were both uplifting and necessary.


The individual authors, a majority of them female, are to be congratulated in finding hope in the most dismal of situations, One essay, in particular, discusses Russias Ivan IVs seven wives, of which three died one didnt live through the wedding celebrations and three others were forced into convents.
His son, later killed by Ivan IV, lived long enough to marry thrice, his wives also tonsured, The essay goes on to discuss the key relationships to the tsar and other nobles that royal nuns maintained and exploited, such as highlighting blood ties in requests for land and money.


It was refreshing to a disheartened feminist to read about womens independence and power through their own industriousness instead of their relationships to men such as clothweaving by Aztec women, which was then used as a direct form of currency a practice and way of life that ended with the advent of Spanish colonialism, and the womencontrolled indigo dyeing industry in northern Nigeria before it was wrested by men.
The anthology succeeded in breaking down countless popular misconceptions, clarifying harem to mean a sacred space that more accurately refers to Mecca than a mans exotic sexual fantasy and illuminating the power many concubines boasted in political affairs by networking through relatives and slaves and proximity to the sultan.
But the collection of essays made clear the deplorable status of even the most privileged of women, all living in unapologetically patriarchal societies,

Though when I started reading I expected lighter fare, Servants of the Dynasty is to be applauded in bringing together sophisticated academic articles that are at the same time easily understandable to those with no scholastic background on the subject.
I, as might be expected, would have liked some discussion of lesbians from a book that boasts inclusion of a wide array of women, but nonetheless happily encourage all feminists to peruse this anthology, and can happily allow my copy to take its place on the shelf reserved for my childhoods beloved princess series.


by Ilinca Popescu Read for research for Japanese women paper Anne Walthall is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine.
She is the editor of Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History and author of The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: Matsuo Taseko and the Meiji Restoration, among others.
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