For centuries the right to choose for oneself in virtually all the key aspects of life would have seemed either absurd or wicked. “What death is worse for the soul,” wrote St. Augustine, “than the freedom to err?” After all, death came into the world when the original humans, exercising their freedom to err, reached out and made their first catastrophic choice.
In the wake of the expulsion from Eden, life was organized to reduce to a minimum the scope of decision-making. Anyone who was not perniciously rebelling against the order of things had to accept what the authorities in the family, the state and the church saw fit to impose. The notion that you should have some say in constituting those authorities — by giving or withholding your consent to this or that leader or by deciding for yourself how to worship God (let alone by considering whether to believe in God at all) — was fiercely denounced. And though obedience was expected of all, it was particularly insisted upon for women, for it was Eve who was the first and most disastrous chooser.
In “The Age of Choice,” the historian Sophia Rosenfeld offers a rich, compelling account of how the experience of choosing ceased to be the object of suspicion and condemnation and became instead the hallmark, at least in liberal, democratic societies, of any life worth living.
The transformation, she acknowledges, did not happen overnight, and its roots are too tangled to allow her to construct a single, straightforward narrative. But, locating crucial initial impulses in the 18th century, she first focuses attention on a London auctioneer named Christopher Cock. Cock cleverly came up with sales techniques that engaged potential purchasers “in a form of carefully choreographed choice-making behavior.” Renting a large space, he artfully arranged the goods he was auctioning off and invited the public to stroll about and decide what they might want to acquire. In effect, he invented shopping. And shopping, Rosenfeld suggests, is at once the supreme model and the most powerful motor force for a society centered on choice rather than compulsion.
The discovery of choice, wrote Immanuel Kant, at once awakened in whole nations the freedom to fashion their own futures and aroused ceaseless anxiety. By comparison, a shopper’s decision as whether to buy a purple or yellow calico seems too trivial to notice. But Rosenfeld convincingly argues that the republican agitator and the bargain hunter are bound up in the same story and that a surprisingly crucial role in this story is played by women. During the 18th century, shopping, and hence the whole culture of consumption engaged in fueling it, was, she writes, “increasingly coded as feminine.”
Here, and throughout her book, the historian draws some of her most powerful evidence from fiction, and her analyses in turn illuminate that fiction. The novels of Jane Austen, with their multiple shopping expeditions, take on a different character. “I work with so fine a brush,” Austen wrote, “as produces little effect after much labor,” but generations of readers have thought otherwise, and Rosenfeld helps to explain why. As “The Age of Choice” abundantly shows, the internal drama over what to buy has surprisingly deep roots. Emma Woodhouse’s ditsy friend Harriet Smith, “still hanging over muslins and changing her mind,” turns out to be participating, on a very small scale, in the same vast forces that animated the revolutionary Milton and the republican Locke.
From shopping Rosenfeld’s book moves on to the possibility of choosing what to believe, and the story becomes more complicated. It was Protestantism, she suggests, that made it possible to pull away from the enforcement of the uniformity of belief and toward the toleration of individual decisions in matters of faith. Of course, the founders of Protestantism were hardly apostles of tolerance. The last thing that Luther and Calvin would have wanted was what the economist Paul Seabright has termed “the divine economy,” a marketplace of competing beliefs any one of which — or none — potential believers may feel free to choose.
Still, the Reformers’ refusal to submit to the authority of the pope ultimately licensed the claim to individual autonomy in religious belief. “The care, therefore, of every man’s soul,” Locke wrote in his “Letter Concerning Toleration,” “belongs unto himself.” The principle applied to every woman’s soul as well. Hence in the 16th century the Protestant Anne Askew defied the Catholic authorities (including her enraged husband), just as a few decades later the Catholic Elizabeth Cary comparably defied the irate Protestants (and yet another enraged husband) arrayed against her.
After commerce and religion, the other principal topics that Rosenfeld analyzes are “selecting a partner” and “voting by ballot.” Her point with all of them is that the arrangements that characterize our modern “age of choice” did not seem self-evident in the past and cannot be taken for granted now. They were areas of moral contention, political conflict and frequently uncomfortable compromise. In every case the object of pespecially intense dispute was a woman’s freedom to decide for herself.
For the most part such disputes were settled by establishing what Rosenfeld calls varieties of “bounded choice.” The example on which she focuses most tellingly are the dance cards that governed the choices of partners on the 19th-century ballroom floor. “If marriage remained a metonym for the social order writ large,” Rosenfeld observes, “then the ball became a metonym for courtship and marriage.” Yes, men and women had choices, but their choices, like the dances themselves, were carefully choreographed.
A final chapter in “The Age of Choice” concerns the specialists — psychologists, marketers, pollsters and the like — who emerged to understand, measure, anticipate and influence the myriad choices that constitute modern life. Innovations that initially sound like an unfettered triumph of Enlightenment freedom become increasingly compromised. In a somber epilogue, Rosenfeld calls into question the decision made by abortion rights groups to call their cause “pro-choice.” The rhetoric of choice seems to her too weak to secure the justice and equality essential to women. “Let’s start wondering,” she writes at the close, “if choice as we know it is really what freedom should be all about.” Perhaps; but which of our hard-won choices would we want to give up first?
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