The volume is centred on the voices of women belonging to various generations, religious faiths and social classes, and presents a range of possible life courses for women in the Alps during the ancien régime and the early 19th century. Focusing on complex lived experiences that have emerged from
a gender-conscious reading of the sources, the contributions illustrate how migration led women to take on roles of responsibility, or to follow their husbands in their careers as artists, traders and businessmen. There also emerges a widespread literacy that is combined with practical skills and
knowledge marked by biological, legal and religious preconceptions: features that permeated the communities studied, where ties of family, religion and patronage prevail upon the dichotomy of public sphere/private sphere.
Starting from individual trajectories, the contributions therefore deal with the web of complex social networks that served to sustain the mutual autonomies as well as the strategies of living together and surviving. The vitality and agency of the female figure presented in the essays help undo the image of backwardness and passivity often associated with women from the mountain regions.
With the contributions of: Patrizia Audenino, Marco Bettassa, Stefania
Bianchi, Camille Caparos, Marina Cavallera, Rolando Fasana, Madline Favre,
Sandro Guzzi-Heeb, Aline Johner, Ernest Menolfi, Anne Montenach, Miriam
Nicoli, Frederica Re.