Connecting 18th-Century Women’s Letters to Contemporary Issues

Elena Alberti (Interdisciplinary Centre for European Enlightenment Studies, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenburg)

§1 Introduction 

Which images, silences and metaphors reveal strategies of cultural resistance? How did women in Enlightenment Europe use letters to narrate — or conceal — experiences of violence? What happens when those who experienced violence lacked the language — or the permission — to speak about it openly? These questions lie at the core of my doctoral project, entitled Narrating violence: testimonies and rhetorical strategies in women’s letters in Italy and Germany (1740-1810). By turning to women’s letters, the project explores how violence was experienced and communicated in a time when female voices were constrained, offering insights that still resonate today. The project aims to restore centrality to the letter as a space for the remembrance and denunciation of sexist violence, as well as  the construction of female agency in Enlightenment Europe. I argue this genre served as a form of self-representation capable of resisting and reshaping the cultural codes of the time: far from being mere instruments of private communication, these missives served as sites of negotiation between individual experience and social constraints, where the authors developed rhetorical and narrative strategies to give voice — explicitly or implicitly — to experiences of physical, psychological, and symbolic violence. The investigation, conducted on a corpus of Italian and German letters from 1740 to 1810, focuses on the linguistic and emotional dimensions of the narratives, examining the metaphors, silences, and forms of self-censorship that shape their reception. 

§2 Reading between lines: the hidden language of violence 

One of the most fascinating aspects of this research is discovering how women navigated limits of expression. In the 18th Century, social and linguistic norms and conventions severely constrained what could be said about personal suffering and domestic violence. As a result, letters often encode violence in indirect ways, such as in metaphors and imagery, or fragmented accounts.¹ These subtler testimonies coexist with more direct accounts. A striking example is Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel (1752-1799), the Italian intellectual and revolutionary, who wrote openly about oppression and injustice in the late 18th Century. She writes: «Veniva a me impedito il libero sfogo con chiunque, spiato ogni mio passo o letto e intercettato qualunque mio scritto o biglietto […] affermando che egli come marito poteva e doveva guidare le mie azioni e la mia coscienza».² This passage exemplifies how women’s epistolary and testimonial writing could serve as a means of denouncing violence and asserting personal subjectivity and female agency. 

§3 Italy and Germany: comparing voices, recognizing patterns 

The project also takes a comparative perspective on Italy and Germany, highlighting similarities and contrasts in how women from each background narrated violence. While both regions shared hierarchical social structures and gendered limitations, differences in legal systems, family expectations, and literary culture shaped the way women could write about suffering. In 18th Century Europe, women — particularly wives — faced structural constraints on their ability to act independently. Their access to education, their capacity to work or manage property, and the freedom to engage in commercial or professional activities were generally contingent on the approval of their husbands. These limitations were embedded features of both the Italian and German sociopolitical systems, deeply shaping  the lives of the women therein.³ By comparing Italian and German letters, the project illuminates both shared strategies for negotiating these constraints, as well as the ways each particular cultural and legal context influenced women’s narratives. These testimonies reveal a complex interplay between personal experience and systemic limitation, shedding light on forms of oppression whose legacies still resonate today. 

§4 Why this research matters today 

Recovering women’s letters from the 18th Century is not merely an academic exercise: it has profound relevance for the present. Violence often persists in forms that are subtle, relational, or socially normalized, and survivors frequently face obstacles to speaking or being heard. Importantly, the project brings attention to voices that have often been overlooked in historical research, inscribing lesser-known female subjectivities into the European Enlightenment debate. The project focuses on the private writings of women whose voices have remained largely at the margins of both historical studies and the canonical texts of the period. These authors often exist on the periphery of well-known revolutionary works, such as Olympe de Gouges’ Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791), or the activism of the Amies de la Vérité, founded the same year to promote women’s rights, including opposition to domestic and marital violence.⁴ By examining these marginal figures, the research highlights alternative and interdisciplinary perspectives on gender, power, and violence, revealing a broader and more nuanced literary social and historical landscape than that represented by the celebrated revolutionary texts alone. 

The ways in which women in the 18th Century narrated experiences of violence offer insights into ongoing challenges related to the representation of female voices in media, legal frameworks, and public discourse. Investigating these letters allows us to recognize the political and social dimensions of private narratives: women’s historical writings are not only testimonies of the past, but also critical instruments for understanding the complex interplay between speech, memory, and power in the present. By examining how women articulated their suffering, this doctoral project illuminates the valuable frameworks these narratives provide for amplifying and supporting women’s voices today, highlighting the continuity between historical memory and current efforts to confront invisibility, marginalization, and structural violence. In doing so, the project reaffirms that understanding expressive strategies, metaphors, silences, forms of self-censorship or concealment, and the emotional lexicons embedded in these letters is essential for both historical scholarship and contemporary debates on gender, testimony, justice, and human rights.

1.  Pellegrin, N., Femmes en correspondances: épistolarité et agentivité (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles), Tracés, 135 (2024): pp. 21–45. ↩︎
2. Archivio di Stato di Napoli, Atti del Proc…, Dep. E. F. P., ff. 94–98. “I was prevented from speaking freely with anyone; my every move was spied upon, and every letter or note I wrote was read and intercepted […] on the grounds that, as my husband, he could and must guide my actions and my conscience.” (translation mine). ↩︎
3. Feci S., Schettini L. (a cura di), La violenza contro le donne nella storia. Contesti, linguaggi, politiche del diritto (secoli XV-XXI), Viella, Roma, 2017.  ↩︎
4. Cavina M., Nozze di sangue. Storia della violenza coniugale, Laterza, Bari-Roma, 2011. ↩︎