The Whole Economy: Work and Gender in Early Modern Europe 1009359355, 9781009359351

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The Whole Economy

Advocating a gender-inclusive approach to the history of work, this book both counts and accounts for women’s as well as men’s economic activity. Showcasing novel conceptual, methodological and empirical perspectives, it highlights the transformative potential of including women’s work in wider assessments of continuity and change in economic performance. Focusing on the period of European history (1500–1800) that generated unprecedented growth in the northwest – which, in turn, was linked to the global redistribution of resources and upon which industrialization depended – the book spans key arenas in which women produced change: households, care, agriculture, rural manufacture, urban markets, migration and war. The analysis refutes the stubborn contention of mainstream economic history that we can generalize about economic performance by focusing solely on the work of adult men, and demonstrates that women were active agents in the early modern economy rather than passively affected by changes wrought upon them. catriona macleod is Lecturer in History at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of Women and Enterprise in Glasgow, c.1740–1830 (forthcoming 2024), and is currently researching women’s financial management and the links between gender, poverty and work in eighteenth-century Scotland. alexandra shepard is Professor of Gender History at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of several books and articles exploring gender difference and social change between 1550 and 1850. Winner of the Philip Leverhulme Prize (2004) and the Leo Gershoy Award (2016), she is currently researching the links between carework, gender inequality and social inequality during Britain’s long eighteenth century. maria a˚gren is Professor of History at Uppsala University. She is the author of several books and articles on property, work and gender in the period from 1600 to 1850. She is the leader of the Swedish Gender and Work research and infrastructure project and has been awarded many major grants for her work.

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Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Whole Economy Work and Gender in Early Modern Europe Edited by

Catriona Macleod University of Glasgow

Alexandra Shepard University of Glasgow

Maria Ågren Uppsala University

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009359351 DOI: 10.1017/9781009359344 © Cambridge University Press & Assessment 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Macleod, Catriona (Lecturer in history), editor. Title: The whole economy : work and gender in early modern Europe / edited by Catriona Macleod, University of Glasgow, Alexandra Shepard, University of Glasgow, Maria Ågren, Uppsala Universitet, Sweden. Description: New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022057805 (print) | LCCN 2022057806 (ebook) | ISBN 9781009359351 (hardback) | ISBN 9781009359368 (paperback) | ISBN 9781009359344 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Women–Employment–Europe–History. | Economic development– Europe. Classification: LCC HD6134 .W52 2023 (print) | LCC HD6134 (ebook) | DDC 331.4094–dc23/eng/20230314 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022057805 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022057806 ISBN 978-1-009-35935-1 Hardback ISBN 978-1-009-35936-8 Paperback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of Tables List of Contributors Preface Introduction: Producing Change margaret r. hunt and alexandra shepard

page vi viii ix 1

1

Households maria a˚ gren

26

2

Care alexandra shepard

53

3

Agriculture jane whittle and hilde sandvik

84

4

Rural Manufactures carmen sarasu´ a

115

5

Urban Markets anna bellavitis

136

6

Migration amy louise erickson and ariadne schmidt

164

7

War margaret r. hunt

200

Select Further Reading Index

221 226

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Tables

1.1 Proportion of male population not engaged in agricultural production page 31 1.2 Examples of mean household sizes in early modern Europe 33 1.3 Women’s presence in different work areas according to marital status. Sweden, 1550–1799 (per cent) 42 1.4 Women’s presence in different work areas according to marital status. Southern Germany, 1646–1800 (per cent) 43 1.5 Women’s presence in different work areas according to marital status. Southern England, 1500–1699 (per cent) 43 3.1 Annual work routines in nineteenth-century Norway 104 3.2 Arable agriculture, south-west England, 1500–1700 109 3.3 Pastoral agriculture, south-west England, 1500–1700 109 4.1 First- and second-most declared occupations by men and women, inland Spain, 1750s 128 5.1 Percentage of women with registered occupations in population censuses and fiscal sources, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries 139 5.2 Percentage of women with registered occupations in population censuses and fiscal sources, by status, seventeenth to eighteenth centuries 139 5.3 Women with registered occupations in care institutions, eighteenth century 141 5.4 Women with registered occupations in court records, seventeenth to eighteenth centuries 141 5.5 Women with registered occupations in marriage contracts in eighteenth-century France 142 5.6 Women’s work in services, seventeenth to eighteenth centuries 144 5.7 Women’s work in retail, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries 145 5.8 Women’s participation in trade, seventeenth to eighteenth centuries 146 5.9 Women’s work in crafts, seventeenth to eighteenth centuries 146 vi

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List of Tables

6.1 Proportion of migrants among the urban poor in early modern Europe 6.2 Proportion of women among those prosecuted for vagrancy in early modern Europe 6.3 Proportion of migrants in the marrying urban population in early modern Europe 6.4 Urban sex ratios expressed as number of men per 100 women in early modern Europe 6.5 Proportion of migrants among the urban servant population in early modern Europe 6.6 Proportion of servants among the immigrant population in early modern Europe

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173 175 177 181 189 191

Contributors

maria a˚gren is Professor of History at Uppsala University, Sweden anna bellavitis is Professor of Early Modern History at Rouen-Normandie University, France amy louise erickson is Professor of Feminist History at Cambridge University, UK margaret r. hunt is Senior Professor of History at Uppsala University, Sweden catriona macleod is Lecturer in History at Glasgow University, UK hilde sandvik is Professor of History at Oslo University, Norway carmen sarasu´a is Professor of Economic History at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain ariadne schmidt is Professor by Special Appointment of the History of Urban Culture, Leiden University, the Netherlands alexandra shepard is Professor of Gender History at Glasgow University, UK jane whittle is Professor of Economic and Social History at Exeter University, UK

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Preface

This collection has grown out of the activities of the Leverhulme International Network on ‘Producing Change: Gender and Work in Early Modern Europe’. We are grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for funding this Network, enabling regular meetings of the Network Partners (Maria Ågren, Anna Bellavitis, Amy Louise Erickson, Margaret Hunt, Carmen Sarasúa, Ariadne Schmidt and Alexandra Shepard) and supporting the research of our Network Facilitator, Catriona Macleod. Between 2015 and 2018 the International Network coordinated workshops in Cambridge, Leiden, Uppsala and Cordoba, and a conference in Glasgow on ‘Invisible Hands: Reassessing the History of Work’. The Network Partners and Facilitator are indebted to all the participants at those events and at the many other conferences at which Network Partners presented the ideas developed in this book. We are particularly grateful to Laura Casella, Valeria Esquivel, Mary Evans, Suraiya Faroqhi, Carla Freeman, Laura Gowing, Mark Hailwood, Lucia Hamner, Julie Hardwick, Karin Hassan Jansson, Jane Humphries, Jezzica Israelsson, Sofia Ling, Luca Mola, Anne Montenach, Renaud Morieux, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, Antonella Picchio, Allyson Poska, Hilde Sandvik, Raffaella Sarti, Deborah Simonton, Jane Whittle and Merry Wiesner Hanks for their contributions to our workshops and conferences. This book has emerged from the extended discussion facilitated by the International Network and we would like to thank all those who have so enriched our thinking through sharing their research and engaging with our collective endeavour. We are also particularly grateful to Hilde Sandvik and Jane Whittle for joining the Network team in the production of this volume by contributing their chapter on agriculture.

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https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009359344.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009359344.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Introduction Producing Change Margaret R. Hunt and Alexandra Shepard

This book advocates a gender-inclusive approach to the history of early modern European work. It both counts and accounts for women’s as well as men’s economic activity and highlights the transformative potential of heeding women’s work for wider assessments of continuity and change in economic performance. The early modern period witnessed unprecedented growth in parts of Europe and elsewhere that was linked both to the global redistribution of resources and to new ways of organizing labour.1 Focusing principally on the three centuries between 1500 and 1800, our chronological parameters remain sufficiently flexible to accommodate some earlier quickening and the later waning of pre-industrial economies across different regions of western Europe. The remit for this book was established by an international network of scholars brought together by a project called ‘Producing Change: Gender and Work in Early Modern Europe’.2 ‘Producing Change’ expresses a dual intent. First, women’s working lives, as well as men’s, produce change. Women were active agents in the early modern economy rather than only passively affected by changes wrought by men. Secondly, our aim is to produce historiographical change by showcasing decades of research on women, gender and work that has pioneered new conceptual, methodological and empirical perspectives. This body of work informs the approaches advocated in the essays that follow, which are designed to refute the stubborn contention of mainstream economic history that we can generalise about economic performance by focusing solely on the work of adult men. In turn, we unravel assumptions that women’s contributions to the early modern economy were consistently lower than men’s, that those contributions were 1

2

Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behaviour and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Jan Lucassen, The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). We are grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for funding meetings of this network between 2015 and 2018.

1

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Margaret R. Hunt and Alexandra Shepard

determined and curtailed by caring responsibilities, and that the household was a closed, patriarchal unit based on rigid divisions of labour. This book is almost as much about men as it is about women: we foreground women’s economic contributions in ways that raise serious questions for mainstream narratives of economic performance that are based on the working lives of men. Besides featuring in the gender analysis that directly compares women and men’s work, men’s work forms an important part of the historiographical backdrop for most of our discussions of women’s work. Setting our sights on the ‘whole economy’ of this book’s title reflects our belief that it is only by studying the work lives of all members of societies, both in the past and the present, that one can see how the diverse components and registers of any economy interact synchronically and diachronically.3 Women’s Rights, Feminist Economics and History When women’s rights movements began to form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, interest in the history of women’s work mounted. In 1898, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an American, wrote about the larger implications of women being expected to provide reproductive and sustenance services largely without pay. Alice Clark and Ivy Pinchbeck showed, in pioneering works appearing in 1919 and 1930, respectively, that English women’s work, both paid and unpaid, was crucial to daily survival in past times and that women’s work was neither ‘timeless’ nor especially biologically determined.4 From the 1950s on, increasing numbers of women across Europe and globally entered the paid workforce and pursued higher education, or participated in anti-colonial, nationalist, and human rights struggles, and many also became active campaigners for women’s equality. The so-called Second Wave Feminism of the 1960s to the 1980s sparked a sharp increase in scholarship 3

4

Sheilagh Ogilvie has used the term ‘whole economy’ in a similar way to this volume. See Sheilagh C. Ogilvie, A Bitter Living: Women, Markets, and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). See also Miriam Glucksmann, ‘Shifting boundaries and interconnections: Extending the “total social organisation of labour”’, Sociological Review 53 (2005), 19–36. To be truly holistic one would also need to include animals and children. On animals, see Jason Hribal, ‘“Animals are part of the working class”: A challenge to labor history’, Labor History 44:4 (2003), 435–53; on child-labour, see Jane Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Marjatta Rahikainen, Centuries of Child Labour: European Experiences from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (London: Taylor & Francis, 2017). Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: The Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (Boston: Maynard and Company 1898); Alice Clark, The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, preface by Amy Louise Erickson (Hoboken: Taylor & Francis, 2013 [1919]); Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers in the Industrial Revolution (London: Routledge, 2013 [1930]).

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on the history of women’s work, with a good deal of this scholarship centring on individual countries or linguistic regions.5 Natalie Zemon Davis’ Society and Culture in Early Modern Europe, which contained several pioneering essays on women’s work, focused largely on Lyon in France; Eva Österberg and Kekke Stadin wrote early essays on Swedish women’s work; Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux contributed several essays on women’s work in Rheims, France; Merry Wiesner produced a study of women’s work in Germany; and Martha Howell looked comparatively at women and work in Leiden and Cologne/Köln.6 Theoretically innovative scholarship also appeared by Minnie Miller Brown and others on the work of women slaves in European colonies or former colonies, especially in the Caribbean and the American South.7 With few secondary sources to lean upon, almost all of this scholarship was based on original archival work and it emphasized context, change over 5 6

7

An important exception to the rule was Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work and Family (New York: Routledge, 1978), which broadly covered both England and France. Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 1975); Eva Österberg, ‘Bonde eller bagerska? Vanliga svenska kvinnors ekonomiska ställning under senmedeltiden. Några frågor och problem’, Historisk Tidskrift 100 (1980), 281–97; Kekke Stadin, ‘Den gömda och glömda arbetskraften: Stadskvinnor i produktionen under 1600- och 1700-talen’, Historisk Tidskrift 100 (1980), 298–319; Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux, ‘The importance of women in an urban environment: The example of the Rheims household at the beginning of the industrial revolution’, in Richard Wall, Jean Robin and Peter Laslett (eds.), Family Forms in Historic Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 475–92; Martha C. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Merry E. Wiesner, Working Women in Renaissance Germany (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986). Other studies or collections included Barbara Hanawalt (ed.), Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Simonetta Cavaciocchi, (ed.), La donna nell’economia secc. XIII-XVIII (Prato: Istituto internazionale di storia economica ‘F. Datini’, 1990); Heide Wunder, ‘Er ist die Sonn’, sie ist der Mond’: Frauen in der frühen Neuzeit (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1992); Beatrice Farnsworth and Lynne Viola (eds.), Russian Peasant Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Angela Groppi (ed.), Il lavoro delle donne (Rome: Laterza, 1996); Maria Bogucka, Białogłowa w dawnej Polsce: Kobieta w społeczeństwie polskim XVI-XVIII wieku na tle porównawczym (Warsaw: Trio, 1998); Deborah Simonton, A History of European Women’s Work, 1700 to the Present (London: Taylor & Francis, 1998); and Amy Louise Erickson, ‘Married women’s occupations in eighteenth-century London’, Continuity and Change 23:2 (2008), 267–307. Minnie Miller Brown, ‘Black women in American agriculture’, Agricultural History 50:1 (1976), 202–12; Robert Ross, ‘Oppression, sexuality and slavery at the Cape of Good Hope’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 6:2 (1979), 421–33; Jacqueline Jones, ‘“My mother was much of a woman”: Black women, work, and the family under slavery’, Feminist Studies 8:2 (1982), 235–69; Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784–1860 (New York: WW Norton & Company, 1984); Rhoda E. Reddock, ‘Women and slavery in the Caribbean: A feminist perspective’, Latin American Perspectives 12:1 (1985), 63–80; Joan Rezner Gundersen, ‘The double bonds of race and sex: Black and white women in a colonial Virginia parish’, Journal of Southern History 52:3 (1986), 351–72; Marietta Morrissey, ‘Women’s work, family formation, and reproduction among Caribbean slaves’, Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 9:3 (1986), 339–67; Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, ‘Women and slavery in the African diaspora: A cross-cultural approach to historical analysis’, Sage 3:2 (1986), 11–15.

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time and the ways gender was inflected by class, race and civil status (slave/free; married/never married, etc.). It showed that women were active as paid and unpaid workers in all early modern economies and that the relationship between women’s ‘productive’ and ‘reproductive’ work was extremely complex. Both Alice Clark and Ivy Pinchbeck had taken up the issue of whether or not women benefited from large-scale economic transformations such as industrialization, though they arrived at diametrically opposed positions on this question. In the 1960s and 1970s the debate expanded to include other socalled turning points in history, along with structural questions, such as whether limiting certain kinds of work solely to men (or, indeed, solely to women) favoured or disfavoured economic growth.8 At the same time, historians of women’s work came under the influence of feminist economists and sociologists who had begun asking parallel questions about the way work, families and patriarchal structures interacted. In so doing, many of them sought an alternative path out of, on the one hand, orthodox Marxism, and, on the other hand, the considerably more conservative ‘New Home Economics’ which flourished from about 1960 onwards under the aegis of Gary Becker and others.9 In both classical and neoclassical economics, the household tended to be treated either as a closed box or as a haven from the callous cash nexus. This contributed to the reluctance of many economists and economic historians to count unpaid work in the household as ‘real’ work with both micro- and macroeconomic implications.10 It also reinforced the claim, common among ‘New Home Economists’, including Becker, that the household could and should be conceptualized as a single decision-making unit, one in which 8

9

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For debates on progress, decline or stagnation in the position of women, see Joan Kelly, ‘Did women have a Renaissance?’, in Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (eds.), Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 137–64; Judith M. Bennett, ‘“History that stands still”: Women’s work in the European past’, Feminist Studies 14:2 (1988), 269–83; Judith M. Bennett, ‘Women’s history: A study in continuity and change’, Women’s History Review 2:2 (1993), 173–84; Bridget Hill, ‘Women’s history: A study in change, continuity or standing still?’, Women’s History Review 2:1 (1993), 5–22; Judith M. Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); and Merry Wiesner-Hanks, ‘Do women need the Renaissance?’, Gender & History 20:3 (2008), 539–57. Ann Oakley, The Sociology of Housework (London: Robertson, 1974); Nancy Folbre, ‘Exploitation comes home: A critique of the Marxian theory of family labour’, Cambridge Journal of Economics 6:4 (1982), 317–29; Christine Delphy and Diana Leonard, Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression (London: Hutchinson, 1984); Nancy Folbre, ‘Hearts and spades: Paradigms of household economics’, World Development 14:2 (1986), 245–55. Ariadne Schmidt, ‘The profits of unpaid work: “Assisting labour” of women in the early modern urban Dutch economy’, History of the Family 19:3 (2014), 301–22, surveys the literature.

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authority might be asymmetrically distributed but all parties were assumed to receive roughly equal benefits.11 Feminist economists, joined by some sociologists and anthropologists, set out to chart a new path. They persistently asked whether society or the economy could be viable without the unpaid work of care or the myriad other things women and some men have routinely done with or without pay.12 In short, they shifted their view from how the economy affects women to the ways women make the economy happen. They criticized the notion of a ‘rational man’ whose self-interested choices, aggregated with those of other men, were said to underlie all of economics.13 They looked closely at the way families apportioned both labour and benefits. They challenged the idea that the family was a single decision-making unit, instead emphasizing a bargaining model, though one in which women were often at a disadvantage.14 They probed the relationship between women’s unpaid work and narrow employment options and high rates of female poverty.15 Finally, they too explored questions to do with change over time, including trying to measure the cost to economic growth when large parts of the female population were denied equal access to education, technology and better-paying jobs.16 11

12 13

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15 16

An influential statement of this position was Gary S. Becker, A Treatise on the Family (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). Becker’s view of internal family workings included the famous claim that the family should be viewed as analogous to a small factory. But he also endorsed the view that the family was or should be a single decision-making unit led by what he rather unfortunately referred to as ‘the benevolent dictatorship of the husband’. For an influential critique of Becker, see Barbara Bergmann, ‘Becker’s theory of the family: Preposterous conclusions’, Feminist Economics 1:1 (1995), 141–50. Unitary views of the family were not confined to conservatives. A model inspired by Marxism, in which the patriarchal elements are more diffuse, is the ‘family economy’, especially as elaborated in Tilly and Scott, Women, Work and Family. For a critique of unitary Marxist notions of the family see Folbre, ‘Exploitation comes home’. Delphy and Leonard, Close to Home; Nancy Folbre, The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values (New York: New Press, 2001). Barbara R. Bergmann, The Economic Emergence of Women (New York: Basic Books, 1986); Marianne A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson (eds.), Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Marilyn Waring, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women are Worth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999 [1988]); Marianne A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson (eds.), Feminist Economics Today: Beyond Economic Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Deniz Kandiyoti, ‘Bargaining with patriarchy’, Gender and Society 2:3 (1988), 274–90; Bina Agarwal, A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Bina Agarwal, ‘“Bargaining” and gender relations: Within and beyond the household’, Feminist Economics 3:1 (1997), 1–51. Mary Daly, ‘Europe’s poor women? Gender in research on poverty’, European Sociological Review 8:1 (1992), 1–12. Ester Boserup, Woman’s Role in Economic Development (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970); June C. Nash and Maria P. Fernández-Kelly (eds.), Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983); Lourdes Benería and Shelley Feldman (eds.), Unequal Burden: Economic Crises, Persistent Poverty, and Women’s Work (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992).

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Many of the preoccupations of feminist economists chimed with those of historians of early modern European women’s work. From the 1980s onwards a considerable number of studies explored the similarities and differences between women’s and men’s work in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.17 At the same time historians began reading ‘normative’ sources with a much more critical eye. They also turned increasingly to other kinds of sources, such as court records, probate, parish records, manorial and factory accounts, tax records, diaries, institutional records and town meeting minutes that seemed to yield a more complex picture of the inner workings of people and their families. In the new scholarship that resulted, tension and conflict were much on display, moreover, these conflicts often revolved around questions of work or consumption.18 Historians also found that, far from unitary, male-led households being universal, in the early modern period many households lacked any male head at all. Many women and men never married or women did not remarry after a spouse died, and the percentage of femaleheaded households was high, especially in urban centres. For example, for Linköping, an average-sized Swedish town, only 60 per cent of households were headed by a married couple in 1754. By 1800 this had fallen to less than 50 per cent. Conversely, households headed by single people (widows/widowers or unmarried people) and singletons (people living alone) rose in the same period from under 40 per cent to ‘well over’ 50 per cent.19 Significant numbers 17

18

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Olwen Hufton, The Prospect before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe 1500–1800 (London: HarperCollins, 1995); Ogilvie, Bitter Living; Margaret K. McIntosh, Working Women in English Society, 1300–1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Daryl M. Hafter, Women at Work in Preindustrial France (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007); Margaret R. Hunt, Women in Eighteenth-century Europe (Harlow: Longman Pearson, 2010); Deborah Simonton and Anne Montenach (eds.), Female Agency in the Urban Economy: Gender in European Towns, 1640–1830 (New York: Routledge, 2013); Maria Ågren (ed.), Making a Living, Making a Difference: Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Anna Bellavitis, Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe (New York: Springer, 2018). Margaret R. Hunt, ‘Wife beating, domesticity and women’s independence in eighteenth-century London’, Gender & History 4:1 (1992), 10–33; Julie Hardwick, The Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and the Politics of Household Authority in Early Modern France (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998); Margaret R. Hunt, ‘Wives and marital “rights” in the Court of Exchequer in the early eighteenth century’, in Mark S. Jenner and Paul Griffiths (eds.), Londinopolis, c. 1500–c. 1750: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 107–29. See also Marianna Muravyeva, ‘“A king in his own household”: Domestic discipline and family violence in early modern Europe reconsidered’, The History of the Family 18:3 (2013), 227–37. Dag Lindström, ‘Families and households, tenants and lodgers: Cohabitation in an early modern Swedish town, Linköping 1750–1800’, Journal of Family History 45:2 (2020), 228–49, 240. See also Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘Singlewomen in medieval and early modern Europe: The demographic perspective’, in Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (eds.), Singlewomen in the European Past 1250–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 38–81; Amy M. Froide, Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Ariadne Schmidt, Isabelle Devos and Bruno Blondé,

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of single people, including female heads of household, are often assumed to be a feature only of north western Europe, but this is misleading. Thus, a recent study of three eighteenth-century censuses in Kythera in the Peloponnese, which for most of the early modern period was under the control of Venice, shows a significant and rising proportion of female heads of household (15 per cent, 24 per cent and 25 per cent of all households in 1724, 1784 and 1788, respectively). It also shows significant numbers of singletons of both sexes – 13 per cent (1724) declining to 7 per cent (1788) of households headed by men and 38 per cent (1724) declining to 35 per cent (1788) of households headed by women.20 Clearly, family structures were dynamic, and it can be expected that the many and frequent changes in household composition both altered power relations and required frequent reorganizations of work. For a long time, economists sought to draw a sharp distinction between ‘productive labour’ (usually equated with paid work) and ‘reproductive labour’ (usually equated with ‘housework’ and the unpaid work of care). Often, they assumed that ‘productive labour’ was dynamic, while ‘reproductive labour’ was essentially static, because it was said to obey the dictates of biology rather than the market. By contrast, a lot of work by women’s historians is uncomfortable with the binary productive/reproductive and it has pretty consistently shown that all forms of women’s (and men’s) labour, regardless of the setting or purpose and irrespective of whether it was paid or unpaid, changed markedly over time. Women’s labour, in particular, was highly sensitive to changing cultural norms, economic shifts, sectoral change, technological innovation, interventions by the state, the migratory patterns both of men and of women and political and social crises (for example, epidemics or war).21 Historians have also shown how misleading the association of care and housework with ‘voluntary’ unpaid work can be, given the fact that a very large proportion of women both in Europe and in the colonies performed this kind of work either for pay, as servants, or under physical duress, as slaves or unpaid dependents.22

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‘Introduction – single and the city: Men and women alone in north-western European towns since the late Middle Ages’, in Julie de Groot, Isabelle Devos and Ariadne Schmidt (eds.), Single Life and the City 1200–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 1–24. Violetta Hionidou, ‘Independence and inter-dependence: Household formation patterns in eighteenth-century Kythera, Greece’, History of the Family 16:3 (2011), 217–34. Carmen Sarasúa, ‘The role of the state in shaping women’s and men’s entrance into the labour market: Spain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, Continuity and Change 12:3 (1997), 347–71; Carmen Sarasúa, ‘Travail féminin: Retour à l’ordre! L’offensive contre le travail des femmes durant la crise économique des années 1930’, Feminist Economics 21:1 (2015), 180–85; Jane Whittle, ‘A critique of approaches to “domestic work”: Women, work and the pre-industrial economy’, Past & Present 243 (2019), 35–70. Whittle, ‘Critique of approaches to “domestic work”’. The literature on slave wet nursing is especially revealing. See Jennifer Morgan, ‘“Some could suckle over their shoulder”: Male travelers, female bodies, and the gendering of racial ideology, 1500–1770’, William and Mary

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The relationship between institutions and the status of women has long been of interest both to feminist economists and historians of women. The wellknown economist Douglass North defined institutions as ‘the humanly derived constraints that structure political, economic and social interactions’ and suggested that they consisted both of informal constraints and sanctions and formal rules, such as systems of law.23 The literature on institutions has also, at times, endorsed a somewhat more conventional conception of ‘institutions’ as groups of actors who bind themselves, usually by some sort of formal agreement, into specialized alliances or associations. These might include the family (or at least the legally married couple), clerical hierarchies, parliaments, universities, city councils, trade guilds, joint-stock companies and the like. Gender historians and historians of early modern women’s work have been interested both in ‘human derived constraints’ in the broader, more cultural sense (for example the impact of religious teachings, or of customary law), and in institutions in the latter sense of structured organizations. They have also occupied themselves with tracing the links between the two, not least because efforts to limit women’s work, educational and political opportunities were often one of the central raisons d’être of such early modern institutions as the (generally) male-led craft guilds, city councils, churches and universities.24 The family is obviously a highly influential social institution and historians have been interested both in how it moulds gender and in how it interacts with other social and political institutions. Thus, in a series of influential books and articles primarily focused on early modern France, Olwen Hufton has anatomized the relationship between state policies, gendered underemployment and family structure. As she shows, almost everywhere most women were at an economic disadvantage compared to most men. Among the reasons for this were the exclusion of women from most formal education and training, occupational crowding (women tended to be excluded from better paid jobs and concentrated in a limited number of relatively poorly paid ones) and the fact that women were less quick to abandon their children than men were, which resulted in women having to spread their already meagre earnings more widely. Women were also starved for land and capital by comparison with men. Hufton and other historians have clearly shown that, as a result of law,

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Quarterly 54:1 (1997), 167–92, and Stephanie Jones-Rogers, ‘“[S]he could . . . spare one ample breast for the profit of her owner”: White mothers and enslaved wet nurses’ invisible labor in American slave markets’, Slavery & Abolition 38:2 (2017), 337–55. For dependents as servants see Guilia Calvi, ‘Kinship and domestic service in early modern Tuscany: Some case studies’, L’ Homme: Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 18:1 (2007), 33–45. Douglass C. North, ‘Institutions’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 5:1 (1991), 97–112, 97. See Chapter 5. On the important issue of women’s access to education, not least the many institutions organized by women to compensate for their exclusion from higher education, see Barbara Whitehead (ed.), Women’s Education in Early Modern Europe: A History, 1500 to 1800 (London: Routledge, 2012).

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custom and institutions in the sense of associations, men across Europe enjoyed more access to real and moveable property and more control over family assets, including money that women had earned. As a result, women alone and women heads of household with children were especially likely to be poor.25 It is perhaps natural that scholars interested in the structural constraints upon women’s work and well-being in the early modern period would turn their attention to the craft guilds. Notwithstanding the favourable view of guilds Alice Clark presented in Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1919),26 many later commentators have seen guilds as a serious impediment to women. Sheilagh Ogilvie has argued that early modern guilds were primarily aimed at generating social capital for male guild members and the women in their immediate families, and that they did so in large part by limiting work opportunities for other people and especially for less-favourably connected women. As such they both disadvantaged women and, over the long run, inhibited economic growth. Moreover, guilds, by placing barriers in the way of women’s ability to survive, often forced them onto the black market where they were vulnerable and poorly remunerated.27 Other historians of guilds have been somewhat more optimistic. They argue that, while the early modern period certainly saw an expansion of all-male guilds that, in many cases, opposed women working in their trade, it also coincided with the rise of women’s guilds, some of which successfully opposed monopolistic efforts by men. Moreover, the attitude of maledominated guilds to women’s work was highly ambivalent and differentiated, and the end of the period also saw determined attempts on the part of some governments to ‘open up’ or ban overly gender-exclusive guilds, though this tended to result in the destruction of women’s guilds along with men’s. It has also become clear that, while male-dominated guilds often excluded women from positions of power, they did not always stop them from performing work, though the jury is still out on whether this work was ‘fairly’ remunerated and whether economic growth was hampered as a result.28 25

26 28

Olwen Hufton, ‘Begging, vagrancy, vagabondage and the law: An aspect of the problem of poverty in eighteenth-century France’, European Studies Review 2:2 (1972), 97–123; Olwen Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-century France 1750–1789 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974); Olwen Hufton, ‘Women and the family economy in eighteenth-century France’, French Historical Studies 9:1 (1975), 1–22; Olwen Hufton, ‘Women without men: Widows and spinsters in Britain and France in the eighteenth century’, Journal of Family History 9:4 (1984), 355–76; and Hufton, Prospect before Her. 27 Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century. Ogilvie, Bitter Living. Dora Dumont, ‘Women and guilds in Bologna: The ambiguities of “marginality”’, Radical History Review 70 (1998), 5–25; Bibi Panhuysen, Maatwerk: Kleermakers, Naaisters, Oudkleerkopers en de Gilden (1500–1800), IISG studies + essays 30 (Amsterdam: IISG, 2000); Christine Werkstetter, Frauen im Augsburger Zunfthandwerk. Arbeit,

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What Kinds of Work Did Early Modern Women Do? Clearly women did experience gender-specific challenges in the workplace. However, the sources show that the vast majority of them had to and did work for a living and that significant numbers of them also worked for money. Accordingly, exploring the kind of work women did has been a major theme in the scholarship on women in the early modern period. One of the first sectors to receive sustained attention was textile production, both in the towns and the countryside. This scholarship, by Thomas Dublin, Antoinette FauveChamoux, Gay Gullickson, Carmen Sarasúa, Jane Humphries, Maxine Berg, Daryl Hafter, Sheilagh Ogilvie, Craig Muldrew and others, has challenged many long-held assumptions about women’s work. It has shown that, in the early modern period, women usually formed the majority of workers in textiles. Moreover, women were often the cash-earners in the family, especially in rural areas. This scholarship has underscored the ways institutions and cultural norms structured and often limited women’s access to workopportunities; it has demonstrated that women’s work changed markedly over time, and it has contributed to theorizing about the macroeconomic significance of women’s work.29

29

Arbeitsbeziehungen und Geslechterverhältnisse im 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001); Clare Crowston, ‘Women, gender, and guilds in early modern Europe: An overview of recent research’, International Review of Social History 53:Supplement 16 (2008), 19–44; Ariadne Schmidt, ‘Women and guilds: Corporations and female labour market participation in early modern Holland’, Gender & History 21:1 (2009), 170–89; Jan Lucassen, Tine De Moor and Jan Luiten van Zanden, ‘The return of the guilds: Towards a global history of the guilds in pre-industrial times’, International Review of Social History 53:Supplement 16 (2008), 5–18; Laura Gowing, Ingenious Trade: Women and Work in Seventeenth-Century London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). See also Chapter 5. Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979); Fauve-Chamoux, ‘Importance of women in an urban environment’; Gay L. Gullickson, Spinners and Weavers of Auffay: Rural Industries and the Sexual Division of Labour in a French Village, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Maxine Berg, ‘Women’s work, mechanization and the early phases of industrialization in England’, in R. E. Pahl (ed.), On Work: Historical, Comparative and Theoretical Approaches (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 61–94; Pat Hudson and W. R. Lee (eds.), Women’s Work and the Family Economy in Historical Perspective (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990); Pamela Sharpe, ‘Literally spinsters: A new interpretation of local economy and demography in Colyton in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, Economic History Review, 44:1 (1991), 46–65; Maxine Berg, ‘What difference did women’s work make to the industrial revolution?’, History Workshop Journal 35 (1993), 22–44; Pamela Sharpe, Adapting to Capitalism: Working Women in the English Economy, 1700–1850 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); Clare Haru Crowston, Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675–1791 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Sheilagh C. Ogilvie, State Corporatism and Proto-Industry: The Württemberg Black Forest, 1580–1797 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Craig Muldrew, ‘“Th’ancient distaff” and “whirling spindle”: Measuring the contribution of spinning to household earnings and the national economy in England,

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In the early modern period, between 60 and 95 per cent of the European population lived in rural areas and most of these people gained a good part of their income or sustenance from agriculture. This has given rise to some important scholarship on women’s role in agriculture, past and present. Some of the earliest and most influential came from the Danish development economist Ester Boserup, who sought to explain why, in some areas of the globe (parts of Africa and India primarily), agriculture was dominated by women, while in other areas it was mixed and in still others it was dominated by men.30 Boserup’s argument was nuanced and, in the larger study, she was especially interested in change over time, including the way that colonial regimes had undermined the position of women farmers by furnishing men – and usually only men – with new and prestigious technologies (for example, automated farm machinery) and encouraging them to seize control of processes previously managed by women. Regrettably, the main thing many agricultural historians took from Boserup was the argument that, in Africa and India, women were more likely to be found in hoe agriculture and men in plough agriculture. Since early modern European agriculture was largely, though never completely, dominated by the plough,31 historians extrapolated from Boserup to conclude that women – apart, perhaps, from milking and cheese-making – had played a negligible role in early modern European agriculture, especially arable. Often, they assumed that women filled in the remaining time with childcare and housework. Fortunately, there has now been a good deal of attention across Europe to the agricultural and other work that women did do, both for home consumption and for exchange; both as members of families and as hired farm servants (or corvée labour) and as workers in rural proto-industry.32 Research on European colonies has also shown the importance of slave women in agricultural labour.33 Much of this work does show evidence of a gendered division

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1550–1770’, Economic History Review 65:2 (2012), 498–526; Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk and Ariadne Schmidt, ‘Reconsidering the “first male breadwinner economy”: Long-term trends in female labor force participation in the Netherlands, c.1600–1900’, Feminist Economics 18:4 (2012), 69–96; Jane Humphries and Benjamin Schneider, ‘Wages at the wheel: Were spinners part of the high wage economy?’ Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers 174 (Oxford: University of Oxford, 2019); Carmen Sarasúa, ‘Women’s work and structural change: Occupational structure in eighteenth-century Spain’, Economic History Review 72:2 (2019), 481–509. An important new contribution is Lucassen, Story of Work, a holistic attempt to discuss work globally and with attention to gender. Unfortunately, this book appeared too late to be incorporated fully into the present volume. Boserup, Woman’s Role in Economic Development. Both maize, common in southern Europe from the 1500s on, and the potato, which spread widely in the later eighteenth century, especially in northern Europe, were hoe crops. This literature is discussed in more detail in Chapter 3. Marietta Morrissey, Slave Women in the New World: Gender Stratification in the Caribbean (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989); Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean

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of labour in many agricultural settings, but it also stresses change over time, variations in terms of the locally important crops or commodities, competition for labour in other sectors (for instance, rural proto-industry) and a great deal of diversity in relation to age, class, condition of servitude and marital status. Another large body of scholarship has explored women’s work in cities and towns. The evidence shows that women were extremely active as petty merchandisers in the streets of early modern towns and sometimes became wholesalers as well. In many towns they supplied a substantial percentage of the foodstuffs – especially perishable items like milk, eggs, fruit and fish – that most people subsisted upon.34 Meanwhile, in most urban areas male artisans worked at home.35 In short, what we now know about the geography of gendered work in most European cities casts considerable doubt on an older scholarship that tended to assert that women were confined to the home while men had a virtual monopoly on the ‘world outside’. It has also become clear that the boundaries between households and the outside world were as permeable in the city as they were in the country. For example, a significant proportion of city women, most of them married women or widows, took in lodgers. Women, therefore, played important roles in relation to two of the greatest needs of city-dwellers (especially new immigrants to the city): food to

34

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Society 1650–1838 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). See, among others, Maria Bogucka, ‘Women and economic life in the Polish cities during the 16th–17th centuries’, in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), La donna nell’economia secc. XIII-XVIII (Prato: Istituto internazionale di storia economica ‘F. Datini’, 1990), 185–94; Andrej Karpinski, ‘The woman on the market place: The scale of feminization of retail trade in Polish towns in the second half of the 16th and the 17th Century’, in Cavaciocchi (ed.), La donna nell’economia secc. XIII–XVIII, 283–92; Darlene Abreu-Ferreira, ‘Fishmongers and shipowners: Women in maritime communities of early modern Portugal’, Sixteenth Century Journal 31:1 (2000), 7–23; Monica Chojnacka, Working Women in Early Modern Venice (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Susan Broomhill, Women’s Medical Work in Early Modern France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Hannah Barker, The Business of Women: Female Enterprise and Urban Development in Northern England, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Danielle van den Heuvel, Women and Entrepreneurship: Female Traders in the Northern Netherlands, c.1580–1815 (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2007); Douglas Catterall and Jodi A. Campbell (eds.), Women in Port: Gendering Communities, Economic and Social Networks in Atlantic Port Cities, 1500–1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Carol Gold, Women in Business in Early Modern Copenhagen 1740–1835 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2018). Danielle van den Heuvel and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk (eds.), ‘Partners in business? Spousal cooperation in trades in early modern England and the Dutch Republic’, special issue of Continuity and Change 23:2 (2008); Manuela Martini and Anna Bellavitis (eds.), ‘Households, family workshops and unpaid market work in Europe from the sixteenth century to the present’, special section of The History of the Family 19:3 (2014); Alexandra Shepard, ‘Crediting women in the early modern English economy’, History Workshop Journal 79 (2015), 1–24. See also Chapters 1 and 5.

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eat and a place to stay.36 Another significant body of historical writing has focused on urban women as servants.37 Finally, women, especially widows, were significant players in early modern capital investment, including acting as local money-lenders, owning both wholesale and retail shops and businesses (a good many were printers and publishers, for example) and investing in and managing long-distance trade, ship-owning and the like.38 Moreover, contrary to what has traditionally been assumed, some of them were extremely active investors in public and private funds, even going so far as to become brokers themselves.39 The scholarship on women and gender has, over the years, come to have a less and less unitary notion of gender. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, which stresses the complex way that different vectors of difference intersect in real life, has been especially influential in this regard.40 With respect to the early modern period, intersectionality has often been used to explore the special vulnerability of women who were also poor, or enslaved, 36

37

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Lindström, ‘Families and households’; Margaret R. Hunt, ‘Women confront the English military state, 1640 to 1715’, in Peter Ericsson et al. (eds.), Allt på ett bräde. Stat, ekonomi och bondeoffer: Festschrift för Jan Lindegren. Studia Historica Upsaliensia 49 (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2013), 247–55. Calvi, ‘Kinship and domestic service in early modern Tuscany’; Madeline Zilfi, ‘Servants, slaves, and the domestic order in the Ottoman Middle East’, Hawwa 2:1 (2004), 1–33; Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux and Richard Wall, ‘Domestic servants in comparative perspective’, History of the Family 10:4 (2005), 345–54; Raffaella Sarti, ‘Historians, social scientists, servants, and domestic workers: Fifty years of research on domestic and care work’, International Review of Social History 59:2 (2014), 279–314; Dirk Hoerder, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk and Silke Neunsinger (eds.), Towards a Global History of Domestic and Caregiving Workers (Leiden: Brill, 2015); Cissie Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies: Servants and their Masters in Old Regime France (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019 [1983]). See also Chapter 6. Margaret R. Hunt, ‘Hawkers, bawlers, and mercuries: Women and the London press in the early Enlightenment’, Women & History 3:9 (1984), 41–68; Daniel A. Rabuzzi, ‘Women as merchants in eighteenth-century northern Germany: The case of Stralsund, 1750–1830’, Central European History 28:4 (1995), 435–56; Abreu-Ferreira, ‘Fishmongers and shipowners’; Gold, Women in Business in Early Modern Copenhagen; Catriona Macleod, Women, Family and Domestic Enterprise in Glasgow’s Economy, c.1740–1830 (forthcoming, 2024). See also Chapter 5. Ann M. Carlos and Larry Neal, ‘Women investors in early capital markets, 1720–1725’, Financial History Review 11:2 (2004), 197–224; Amy Louise Erickson, ‘Coverture and capitalism’, History Workshop Journal 59 (2005), 1–16; Amy M. Froide, Silent Partners: Women as Public Investors during Britain’s Financial Revolution, 1690–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Several historians have also paid attention to the financial arrangements of poor women and men. See Margaret R. Hunt, ‘Women and the fiscal-imperial state in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries’ in Kathleen Wilson (ed.), A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 29–47; Laurence Fontaine, L’économie morale. Pauvreté, crédit et confiance dans l’Europe préindustrielle (Paris: Gallimard, 2008); and Cathryn Spence, Women, Credit and Debt in Early Modern Scotland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). Kimberlé Crenshaw, ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color’, Stanford Law Review 43:6 (1991), 1241–99.

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or belonged to a persecuted religion. It has also proved useful for thinking about the ways factors like civil status could both reinforce and be reinforced by gender. This has implications for work since, to a considerable extent, the work both women and men did, including whether it was paid or unpaid, how heavy, difficult or dangerous it was, how much it involved deploying the labour of others, as well as the degree of prestige they derived from it (if any) depended not only upon gender but upon such factors as whether they were single or married, rich or poor, white or non-white, enserfed/enslaved or free.41 Though much of the historical scholarship indebted to intersectionality focused originally on European colonies or former colonies, attention to the way gender intersects with other categories of difference has had a significant methodological and programmatic impact on historians who work on Europe as well. The present collection, though its centre of gravity is the European metropole, is no exception. Macroeconomic Change Historians of women’s work have almost always been interested in studying not just the way the economy affected women, but the way women’s actions contributed to big-picture economic transformations. Thus, historians have long seen consumption – including the consumer choices of women and poor people – as possible drivers of cultural and economic change.42 More recently both women’s work and women’s consumer choices have been assigned causal significance in the ‘little divergence’ that placed north western Europe

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Margaret R. Hunt, ‘Relations of domination and subordination in early modern Europe and the Middle East’, Gender & History 30:2 (2018), 366–76. See, among others, Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978); Lorna Weatherill, ‘A possession of one’s own: Women and consumer behavior in England, 1660–1740’, Journal of British Studies 25:2 (1986), 131–56; Margot Finn, ‘Women, consumption and coverture in England, c. 1760–1860’, Historical Journal 39:3 (1996), 703–22; Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (eds.), Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe 1650–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Daniel Roche, A History of Everyday Things: The Birth of Consumption in France, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy, 1400–1600 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Maxine Berg et al. (eds.) Goods from the East, 1600–1800: Trading Eurasia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). On poorer people’s consumption practices, see Beverly Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800, Pasold Studies in Textile History 9 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Cissie Fairchilds, ‘Fashion and freedom in the French Revolution’, Continuity and Change 15:3 (2000), 419–33; John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); and Beverly Lemire, ‘“Men of the world”: British mariners, consumer practice, and material culture in an era of global trade, c. 1660–1800’, Journal of British Studies, 54:2 (2015), 288–319.

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on a distinct trajectory of growth in the early modern period vis-à-vis much of southern Europe and, in time, the rest of the globe.43 Thus, Jan de Vries has assigned a prominent role in this process to an ‘industrious revolution’, which is said to have included the reallocation of women’s labour in north western Europe to market-oriented work, attended both by productivity gains and increased consumption.44 Extending further back in time, Tine De Moor and Jan Luiten van Zanden have coined the term ‘girl power’ – to describe the waged work performed by late-marrying and celibate single women – and they argue that this pattern of low nuptiality and high female labour-force participation (often referred to as the Northwestern European Marriage Pattern) helped drive northern Europe’s faster economic development as compared to much of Southern Europe in the centuries after the Black Death.45 Historians remain divided over the significance of ‘industriousness’, consumption and ‘girl power’ and on whether new forms of industriousness were distinctly north western European or even European. On the ‘industrious revolution’, several studies have suggested that, while north western European women’s workload did apparently increase in the eighteenth century, it probably was not due to a desire for consumer goods. Instead it seems likely that they were responding to rising taxes and prices and mounting poverty.46 With respect to ‘girl power’, studies of family structures in eastern Europe, southern Europe and around the Mediterranean have shown that these were far more diverse than is implied by John Hajnal’s famous binary division of Europe into late marriers who also tended to spend their teens and early twenties in life-cycle service, and early 43 44 45

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Pomeranz, Great Divergence. The term ‘Little Divergence’ was coined by Philip Gorski. de Vries, Industrious Revolution. Tine De Moor and Jan Luiten van Zanden, ‘Girl power: The European Marriage Pattern and labour markets in the North Sea region in the late medieval and early modern period’, Economic History Review 63:1 (2010), 1–33; Alexandra M. de Pleijit and Jan Luiten van Zanden, ‘Accounting for the “little divergence”: What drove economic growth in pre-industrial Europe, 1300–1800?’, European Review of Economic History 20:4 (2016), 387–409; Jan Luiten van Zanden, Tine De Moor and Sarah Carmichael, Capital Women: The European Marriage Pattern, Female Empowerment and Economic Development in Western Europe 1300–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). For critiques of the ‘industrious revolution’ thesis, see Robert C. Allen and Jacob L. Weisdorf, ‘Was there an “industrious revolution” before the industrial revolution? An empirical exercise for England, c.1300–1830’, Economic History Review 64:3 (2011), 715–29; Craig Muldrew, Food, Energy and the Industrious Revolution: Work and Material Culture in Agrarian England, 1550–1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk and Ariadne Schmidt, ‘Le travail des femmes et des enfants dans une société industrieuse: les Province-Unies (XVIIe–XIXe siècle)’, in Corinne Maitte and Didier Terrier (eds.), Les Temps du Travail: Normes, pratiques, évolutions (XIVe–XIXe siècle) (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2014), 433–53; and Carmen Sarasúa, ‘Working harder but still poor’ (XVth World Economic History Congress, Session: ‘Industrious women and children of the world? Jan de Vries’ ‘Industrious revolution’ as a conceptual tool for researching women’s and children’s work in an international perspective’, Utrecht, 2009), unpublished paper used by permission. See also Chapter 4.

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marriers, who did not.47 Moreover, studies have cast doubt on the rosy pictures of women’s work opportunities in the aftermath of the Black Death promoted by van Zanden et al.48 At the same time, Jan Lucassen has recently argued that industrious revolution(s) that relied heavily on the work of women and children were not exclusive to Europe, but occurred in large parts of Japan, China and India between 1500 and 1800.49 Whether constructs like the industrious revolution or ‘girl power’ survive over the long-term, the debates surrounding them are nevertheless important. That is because all these theories take seriously the possibility of a causal relationship between women’s work, women’s economic agency and macroeconomic growth or decline. As van Zanden, De Moor and Carmichael rightly argue, ‘there are reasons to pay much more attention to the role played by women as engines of economic change’.50 What Does the Present Volume Contribute? One of the striking features of the economic history profession has been the resilience of certain stereotypes about women, even in the face of an enormous

47

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49 50

See, especially, John Hajnal, ‘Two kinds of preindustrial household formation systems’, in Richard Wall, Jean Robin and Peter Laslett (eds.), Family Forms in Historic Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 65–104. There is a large literature critiquing Hajnal and his successors. For an overview of the Eastern European evidence, see Mikolaj Szołtysek, ‘Households and family systems’, in Hamish Scott (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350–1750, vol. 1: Peoples and Place (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 313–41. For southern Europe, especially Italy, see Pier Paolo Viazzo, ‘What’s so special about the Mediterranean? Thirty years of research on household and family in Italy’, Continuity and Change 18:1 (2003), 111–37. On marriage patterns and economic growth see Tracy Dennison and Sheilagh Ogilvie, ‘Does the European marriage pattern explain economic growth?’ Journal of Economic History 74:3 (2014), 651–93. For critiques of the ‘girl power’ construct see Beatrice Zucca Micheletto, ‘Reconsidering the Southern Europe model: Dowry, women’s work and marriage patterns in pre-industrial urban Italy (Turin, second half of the eighteenth century)’, History of the Family 16:4 (2011), 354–70; Dennison and Ogilvie, ‘Does the European Marriage Pattern explain economic growth?’; Jane Humphries and Jacob Weisdorf, ‘The wages of women in England, 1260–1850’, Journal of Economic History 75:2 (2015), 405–47; and Judith M. Bennett, ‘Wretched girls, wretched boys and the European Marriage Pattern in England (c.1250–1350)’, Continuity and Change 34:3 (2019), 315–47. For a response, to some of the critics see Sarah Carmichael, Alexandra de Pleijt, Jan Luiten van Zanden and Tine De Moor, ‘Reply to Tracy Dennison and Sheilagh Ogilvie: the European Marriage Pattern and the little divergence’, CGEH Working Paper no. 70 (2015); Manon van der Heijden, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk and Ariadne Schmidt, ‘Terugkeer van het Patriarchaat? Vrije Vrouwen in de Republiek’, Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis 6:3 (2009), 26–52, and Tine de Moor and Jan Luiten van Zanden, ‘Een reactie van De Moor en van Zanden op het TSEG-artikel van Manon van der Heijden, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk en Ariadne Schmidt’, TSEG – The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History 9:2 (2012), 61–68. Lucassen, Story of Work, especially 193–291. Van Zanden, De Moor and Carmichael, Capital Women, 1–2.

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volume of research disproving them. All of us specialize, but it may only be in the realm of women’s history that prominent economic historians can still publish articles in prestigious journals endorsing assumptions about women and their work that have been refuted scores, sometimes hundreds of times, in a literature they apparently do not feel called upon to read. This is a conundrum that is beyond the capacity of one book to solve. Nevertheless, given the extraordinary richness of the literature, one function of any book of this kind must be to examine and attempt to synthesize existing findings, some of which go back, as has been said, a century or more. At the same time, we aim to register newer developments in the field, both from our own work and that of others. Several theoretical assumptions and principles inform our analysis. We do not treat gender as a static state but as something that must be seen in context. It intersects with and is coproduced alongside other social structures, such as the state, guilds, and the family. The construct of gender cannot be understood independently of other categories of difference, such as marital status, class, race and age. We view work as a flexible concept. As we will see, economic history models often assume a high level of labour specialization and single occupations, at least for men. This collection shows, instead, that multiple employments were the norm for both women and men in the early modern period, and that this extended across the economy. So, for example, both men and women performed care-work, some of it for pay and some not and almost always as just one among many tasks. We aim here to contribute to larger questions about how labour flexibility worked both at the micro and macro levels as well as to form the groundwork for a more informed understanding of both continuity and change in the history of gender and work. This collection uses the evidence and recent scholarship to take aim at the resilient stereotypes that have persisted in economic history. We reject the view that women’s share of care work is impervious to change. We also try to think about change in a more complex way than some historians have done. For example, historians have probably paid too much attention to concepts like ‘industriousness’ and too little to the effects of high labour demand. They have either underestimated the extent of female migration or tended to attribute it to non-economic motives. And they have often minimized women’s participation in agriculture, in manufacture and in buying and selling both as a result of over-simple analogies drawn on the basis of data on economic development outside Europe51 and over-literal readings of early modern moral teachings 51

Simple analogies between early modern Europe and other parts of the globe have also worked to the detriment of modern, non-European women. See Barbara Rogers, The Domestication of Women: Discrimination in Developing Societies (London: Routledge, 2005).

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about the role of women. Paying attention to the sheer scope and diversity of women’s economic contributions has implications for an understanding of work at the micro-level and for larger macroeconomic questions, not least issues to do with modernization and economic growth. Finally, we view economic life – including work – as being about wellbeing, both for women and men. This means that work and the gains from work, whether monetary or otherwise, are not seen in a narrowly econometric way or as a mere means of survival – important as those are – but as a central feature of a culture and of what it means to be human. This collection also brings more up-to-date methods to the task. Almost everyone agrees that the kinds of sources economic historians have traditionally used to track workforce behaviour, remuneration for work, etc. are misleading when it comes to work done by women. National censuses, which, for the most part came quite late in the European context,52 tended and still tend to count the paid work of male heads of household, or, more often, merely to list these men’s occupational titles (themselves misleading, as we will see), while minimizing, understating or ignoring both the paid work of women and children and unpaid or subsistence work, regardless of who performs it. Already in the 1990s some historians of women, indebted to feminist development economists, were beginning to venture into time-use analysis as a way to overcome some of these challenges.53 However, in recent years, partly as a result of greater computing capacity, we have gained the ability to analyse much larger bodies of data for earlier periods and, as a result, to deliver a more nuanced and gender-inclusive picture of how early modern people actually used their time. These methods use large-scale mining of a diversity of sources (and, in particular, witness depositions in early modern court cases) to concatenate thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of ‘snapshots’ (usually people’s personal accounts of what they were doing at a particular time and place) into a detailed picture of how, where and when early modern people worked.54 One of the central benefits of this approach is that it makes it possible to study both paid work and unpaid or subsistence work and to do so both for women and for men. This scholarship offers new empirical

52 53 54

City and provincial censuses came earlier in some places, especially in Italy. A well-known example is the Florentine Catasto of 1427. Janet Blackman, ‘Historians and time-use analysis’ (Conference Report II), Social History 21:1 (1996), 93–95. Ågren (ed.), Making a Living; Ogilvie, Bitter Living; Rosemarie Fiebranz, Erik Lindberg, Jonas Lindström and Maria Ågren, ‘Making verbs count: The research project “Gender and Work” and its methodology’, Scandinavian Economic History Review 59:3 (2011), 273–93; Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Jane Whittle and Mark Hailwood, ‘The gender division of labour in early modern England’, Economic History Review 73:1 (2020), 3–32.

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evidence for one of the fundamental claims of early feminist economists: that both paid and unpaid work were crucial to the functioning of economies. Economic historians have long assumed that men in the past had stable occupations (farmer, shoemaker, merchant), while women, to the extent that they participated at all in paid work, tended to flit between temporary, piecemeal and non-specialized modes of earning a living. This flies in the face of a long tradition of writing on rural life, in the past and the present, as well as newer work on time-use in the early modern period. This work does indeed show that women, especially married women, were likely to engage in a number of different ways of making a living simultaneously – such as spinning, selling things on the street or offering care for others in return for payment in cash or in kind. But the research also shows that largely identical patterns characterized the work of most men.55 ‘Pluriactivity’, as it is often called, was almost certainly the default way of making a living for the vast majority of people of both sexes in early modern Europe; it still is today for farmers and many urban workers across the globe.56 These findings cast doubt on one of the traditional means economic historians use to plot men’s earning power over time, that is, grouping men by occupational title (for example, carpenter) and presuming, first, that that is what they did most of the time and, secondly, that that is what they mainly got paid for doing. They also raise questions about the use of occupational descriptors from early modern sources to estimate the distribution of workers between the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors. Several of the chapters in this book, particularly Chapters 1, 3 and 4, reflect on this problem. Common to a good deal of the existing scholarship in economic history is the assumption that women in the early modern period spent most of their time at home, devoted to unpaid homemaking and care-work with only occasional supplementary paid work on the side, while men went out to do ‘real’ work for pay or other substantial provision. While it is true that in many societies there were cultural norms that identified women with the home and men with provision, the bulk of the evidence shows that few early modern families followed what is often called ‘the male breadwinner model’. Indeed, considerable doubt has been cast on how accurate this model was even in the period said to have been its hey-day (depending on the country this is usually dated to somewhere between 1850 and 1960).57 This is another area in which new methods are allowing an increasingly complex picture to emerge. Recent 55 56

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See, especially, Ågren (ed.), Making a Living. There is a large literature on pluriactivity, both in the present day (generated especially in the context of rural studies) and for the early modern period, both in relation to rural and urban contexts. See, especially, Chapter 1. Critiques of the ‘male breadwinner model’ focus on two broad questions. The first is whether women really did cease to work across Europe, with researchers drawing attention both to

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research has shown variously that, while homemaking and care (and, to a lesser extent food-processing) were important and were more often associated with women than with men, they did not take up as much time as women’s other work activities – including farm-work, buying and selling, managing the labour of others and cottage or proto-industry. For example, a study by Jane Whittle and Mark Hailwood of work tasks undertaken by married woman in south-west England between 1500 and 1700 and recorded in court records, showed that they spent on average 11 per cent of work-tasks recorded on care work (paid and unpaid), 6 per cent on food preparation (paid and unpaid), and 21 per cent on housework (paid and unpaid). Moreover, 21 per cent of their work-tasks were in agriculture, 9 per cent in crafts and construction, 18 per cent in ‘commerce’ (including selling or exchanging their own handiwork), 5 per cent in management of others’ labour and 8 per cent in transport. The data reveal differences between married women and servants, small farms and large ones, and women in rural areas versus women in towns. They also show shifts over the two centuries studied, with women’s field-tasks declining as farms grew larger, and women’s participation in many crafts first rising, then declining, and then, at the end of the period, rising again. It also appears that women’s already heavy involvement in buying and selling increased over the course of the period studied.58 Two corollaries of the mistaken belief that early modern families followed the ‘male breadwinner model’ have been, on the one hand, a tendency to see women’s share of the work as essentially unchanging and even biologically determined, and, on the other, a tendency to underestimate the degree to which men worked from home, performed care work, or engaged in subsistence activities. These have caused some odd distortions in the scholarship. A striking case is a recent model predicated on the claim that, measured in terms of workdays, British women in the early modern period did 30 per cent of the paid work while men did 70 per cent. This is accompanied by the claim that the proportion has not appreciably changed in 600 years.59 The 30/70

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considerable regional diversity and to the underreporting of women’s work in domestic service, on family farms and in light industry. See, e.g., Birgit Pfau-Effinger, ‘Socio-historical paths of the male breadwinner model: An explanation of cross-national differences’, British Journal of Sociology 55:3 (2004), 377–99; and Jane Humphries and Carmen Sarasúa, ‘Off the record: Reconstructing women’s labor force participation in the European past’, Feminist Economics 18:4 (2012), 39–67’. To the extent that women did leave the paid workforce, the second body of research asks whether this was by choice or the result of coercion or new structural constraints. Céline Schoeni, Travail féminin: retour à l’ordre: L’offensive contre le travail des femmes durant la crise économique des années 1930 (Lausanne: Editions Antipodes, 2012). Whittle and Hailwood, ‘Gender division of labour’, 15, table 8. See also Whittle, ‘Critique of approaches to “domestic work”’. Stephen Broadberry, Bruce M. S. Campbell, Alexander Klein, Mark Overton and Bas van Leeuwen, British Economic Growth, 1270–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

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proportion is based on the belief that women ‘must’ have spent most of their time on unpaid housework and childcare, while the alleged lack of change over time strongly implies some sort of biological constant. In reality, both scholarship focused on the past and development economists’ work on gender and time-use in the contemporary world, shows that the amount of time women spend on housekeeping and care (and other activities), both paid and unpaid, has varied considerably over time, depending on context, time period, and their status (single, married, servant, slave, etc.). Thus, many women engaged fulltime, and for pay, in care and domestic work, so the equation of care and housework with non-paying work is both misleading and wrong.60 Moreover, the time that men devoted to care-giving, subsistence, and homemaking, not to mention their other tasks, was also perpetually changing. In addition to its claims about women, the 30/70 model presumes that British men over the last 600 years have spent only 3 per cent of their time on care work, housework, etc. Yet cross-cultural time-use studies today, as well as studies from the early modern period covering Sweden, Southwest Germany and England, while suggesting considerable variation, also show that on average men spent (and spend) between 14 (at the lowest end) and 34 per cent (at the highest end) of their time engaged in care, housework, and homebased subsistence activities.61 Issues of this kind are taken up in several chapters in this book. Chapter 2 addresses the implications of more flexible and dynamic views of work for our understanding both of women’s and men’s care work in the early modern period. Far from being a static constant, undertaken on an unpaid basis by women in the home, care work – both within and beyond the household – was also distributed between the market, the state, and the voluntary sector. Moreover, the distribution of care between paid and unpaid provision and beyond the familial setting, was fluid and subject to change, affected by a variety of factors, including the labour market for women’s work. Chapter 3 also shows just how variable women’s work could be across different parts of Europe.62 Similarly, Chapter 7 shows the ways that conflict and calamity could change the nature of women’s work, disrupt their lives and well-being, but also offer new work opportunities. In short, neither tacit appeals to male breadwinner ideology, nor the claim that either women’s or men’s work lives were unchanging over long stretches of time or largely defined by biology seem useful for understanding the gendered distribution of work in the early modern period.

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See Jane Humphries and Carmen Sarasúa, ‘The feminization of the labor force and five associated myths’, in Günseli Berik and Ebru Kongar (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Economics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), 167–76. Whittle, ‘Critique of approaches to “domestic work”’, 59, table 1. Whittle and Hailwood, ‘Gender division of labour’.

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As Erickson and Schmidt demonstrate in Chapter 6, the movement of people is an important feature of almost all early modern and modern economies, but this has been a neglected topic where women are concerned. It appears women migrants were almost always part of the mobile and highly flexible labour force that fuelled an increasingly dynamic economy, both in Europe itself and in the emerging European colonies. It used to be argued that men migrated long distances and internationally, while women stayed home or only migrated short distances in order to marry. We now know that both men and women emigrated for both reasons; and few modern scholars who write either on women or on the early modern family would any longer argue that marriage in those times was a ‘non-economic’ institution. Voluntary migration could be fairly successful, leading to real jobs (or, as the case might be, marital opportunities), or it could devolve – as in the case of many refugees from war, persecution, epidemics, harvest failure or enclosure – into semipermanent vagrancy and destitution. Moreover, a significant proportion of work migration was not voluntary at all, with women and children of both sexes forming a significant proportion of the people forcibly transported from Africa to Europe and the European colonies as slaves. Nor was it the case that migration only involved people moving – or being moved – from the rural areas to the city. There is plenty of evidence that migration was multidirectional, which is to say that people – including many women – migrated, voluntarily or not, from one rural area to another, and from town to country, sometimes on a seasonal basis and sometimes permanently.63 Migration, forced and otherwise, was a key factor in ‘peopling’ the European colonies and trading centres, and it also needs to be taken into account in relation to proto-industry and the factory system, not least because it helped supply the heavily female workforces upon which these kinds of industries relied. The relationship between women and early modern governance, both at the local or provincial level and at the level of the state, has also frequently been neglected in the scholarship, which is often heavily invested in the notion that men were always and everywhere the ones who mediated between the home and the outside world. To be sure, a large body of scholarship on women petitioners, women in politics and women in relation to the law has undermined the claim that the state and relations between subjects (or citizens) and the state were a male-only enterprise, but there have been few efforts to think about this in relation to women’s work.64 Several chapters in this collection

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See, e.g., Sarasúa, ‘Working harder but still poor’. Though see Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), which discusses Augsburg city council’s policies on gender, work, sexuality and the family, and Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2002) on legal systems and women.

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take up this question. Chapter 2 shows that, far from the household being the only locus of care, state provision of care was an important feature of many early modern economies. City government plays a role in Chapters 5 and 6, while the nation state features prominently in Chapter 7. That chapter makes it clear that armies – and states at war – both exploited the labour of women and offered opportunities for the more resourceful among them. We also know that, roughly from the seventeenth century onward, women investors moved quite aggressively into the new ‘funds’ that, in most European states, supported rising war costs.65 The lesson here is that the relationship between public institutions and the family needs to be substantially rethought if we are to take full account of the larger significance of early modern women’s work.66 As already mentioned, for a long time scholars assumed that premodern families were closed patriarchal systems and either characterized by a high degree of internal agreement or opaque enough as to their inner workings to justify treating them like a single unit. Many households were probably ‘patriarchal’ in some sense, or at least hierarchical, but simplistic assumptions about how this worked in practice have distorted historians’ perspectives on the distribution of economic agency in early modern Europe. Widely acknowledged as the primary unit of production, the household depended on the working activities of all its capable members (including children and domestic animals). As a result, it is very misleading to try to chart micro- or macroeconomic change on the basis of the contributions of the male household head alone. This is not simply a matter of counting the contributions of women, children and animals (although this remains an important task) but also, as the newer scholarship establishes, by showing the dispersed character of economic agency through delegation and interdependency in ways which further undermine the credibility of ‘rational man’ as the subject of economic history. It is also important to demonstrate how ‘open’ to outside economic and other influences the early modern family actually was. Several chapters in this volume and especially Chapter 1, explore this issue in different ways. They also show that, in practice, families were highly diverse, fluid, and not necessarily characterized by consensus or unanimity. The conclusion to be drawn from this is that economic historians need to develop significantly more complex models of the way individual, family, and larger-group interests functioned and, at times, conflicted in the early modern period.

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Geertje Wiersma, Johanna Borski: Financier van Nederland 1764–1846 (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1998); Froide, Silent Partners. Hunt, ‘Women and the fiscal-imperial state’.

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Conclusion Any definition of work that ignores the blood, sweat and toil of the worker, and focuses only on limited evidence of paid work, is an impoverished intellectual tool for understanding the economies of the past. In this book we take an expansive approach to work which defines it in terms of the tasks and responsibilities undertaken to secure a living and which involves a variety of types of labour and unpaid as well as paid work. Influenced by the work of the economist Amartya Sen, several of the chapters also pay attention to the relationship between women’s (and men’s) work, capabilities and well-being.67 As we have seen, this theoretical approach is not wholly new. Feminist economists and many economic historians long ago adopted quite expansive notions of work. However, the implications of these principles have not always been worked through to the extent that they could be in relation to questions about women’s or, indeed, men’s work in the early modern period. So, as we have seen, fully taking on board a notion like pluriactivity, as a characteristic of both women’s and men’s work, suggests that we may need to stop relying so heavily on the standard occupational descriptors that have long served to measure occupational diversity, sectoral distributions and labour productivity. This is so not only because these methods routinely exclude the majority of, if not all, women from analysis, but because they misrepresent the work of most men. It is not just the work performed that is important but the relationships that shape the value of that work for different actors. This is where a concept like well-being becomes crucial. Over and over again in this book we ask, ‘for and with whom does one work and under what rules and conditions?’68 Such questions lie at the heart of gendered divisions of labour and of differential access to training, skill, capital and remuneration. Of necessity, structural inequalities between men and women are part of this story, but so are other differences. Clearly women’s work was fundamental to early modern economic performance, but it is also essential to pay attention to the many forms of discrimination that limited most women’s working lives and which, at the same time did not treat all women (or men) equally. In advocating a gender-inclusive 67 68

Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Karin Hofmeester et al., ‘The global collaboratory on the history of labour relations, 1500–2000: Background, set-up, taxonomy, and applications’ (Amsterdam: International Institute of Social History Dataverse, 2016) http://hdl.handle.net/10622/4OGRAD, 6 (last accessed 9 January 2023). See also Maria Ågren, ‘At the intersection of labour history and digital humanities: What vaguely described work can tell us about labour relations in the past’, Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture Series, ed. Abdelkade Al Ghouz, Jeannine Bischoff and Sarah Dusend, 2 (Berlin: EBVerlag, 2020).

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approach to the early modern economy this book remains alert not only to women’s enterprise and initiative in responding to and creating opportunities for themselves and others but also to women’s vulnerability – often made worse by poverty, foreignness, race and marital status – to many of the extractive and exploitative dynamics of the early modern economy. In this book we offer an account of the whole economy rather than a partial impression distorted by prioritizing a simplified view of male employment. By exploring what a gender-inclusive approach can tell us about the character of economic performance we hope to foster a re-evaluation of the meta-narratives that historians have used to account for economic ‘progress’ in the early modern period. We also want to encourage a critical engagement both with concepts of economic agency/capacity and with the measures used by economic historians to assess economic change. The book is designed to show irrevocably how taking account of women’s work can not only enhance but transform our understanding of early modern economics and society. We also hope that it will inspire others to take a more expansive view of what an economy is. A ‘whole economy’ approach is not just more faithful to the breadth of scholarship. It is also a better way to understand early modern society and to comprehend change over time.

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Households Maria Ågren

Introduction In the early modern period, both women and men were by necessity flexible in their economic activities and often had multiple sources of income. Having multiple sources of income was a widespread phenomenon in the early modern world; its presence in many languages – German Mehrfachtätigkeit, French pluriactivité, Italian pluriattività, Swedish mångsyssleri – bears witness to its relevance.1 Having many sources of income could be a sign of both resourcefulness and vulnerability, just as engagement in many activities could indicate both agency and lack of power and influence. However, the need to combine many sources of income did have one uniform effect (as this chapter will show): it turned early modern households into open and ‘public’ spaces of work and work-related activities rather than closed and isolated units of private life.2 Families and their servants worked at home, in other people’s homes and outdoors, but rarely in specially designated workplaces.3 This openness could, in turn, expand people’s scope for agency and affect structures of authority. It is in this light that women’s economic contributions should be seen. In an older demographic historiography, the closed and hierarchic character of early modern households was often taken for granted. Adult sons allegedly had no attractive alternatives to obeying their fathers, who controlled the 1

2

3

Aleksander Panjek, ‘The integrated peasant economy as a concept in progress’, in Aleksander Panjek, Jesper Larsson and Luca Mocarelli (eds.), Integrated Peasant Economy in a Comparative Perspective. Alps, Scandinavia and Beyond (Koper: University of Primorska Press, 2017), 26–39. Ad Knotter, ‘Problems of the “family economy”: Peasant economy, domestic production and labour markets in pre-industrial Europe’, in Maarten Praak (ed.), Early Modern Capitalism: Economic and Social Change in Europe 1400–1800 (London: Routledge, 2001), 133–58, especially 136; Joachim Eibach, ‘Das offene Haus: Kommunikative Praxis im sozialen Nahraum der europäischen Frühen Neuzeit’, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 38 (2011), 621–64, especially 621, 626, 635–36, 644. See also David Sabean’s argument that the household concept obscures the permeability of household economies. David Sabean, Property, Production and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 97. Jane Whittle, ‘Home and work’, in Amanda Flather (ed.), A Cultural History of the Home in the Renaissance, 1450–1650 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 103–26.

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means of subsistence, and wives ‘submitted to the authority of their husbands and fathers partly because they had no other way to subsist’. In contrast, late nineteenth-century developments were understood suddenly to have opened up the ‘old’ family economy and conferred agency on the household’s subordinate members. Both intergenerational co-residence and marital stability were thought to have eroded as a consequence of the industrial revolution and the concomitant employment opportunities of which household members could now avail themselves.4 Even if more detailed studies have demonstrated that, for example, intergenerational co-residence declined much earlier in some parts of Europe, the image of closed, hierarchic pre-1900 households has lingered on.5 It finds support in another strand of historiography that has emphasized how ideas about domestic order and obeisance to heads of households were canvassed from the Reformation onwards.6 It is noteworthy how central ideas about subsistence and domestic power in the early modern world are to this narrative. Opportunities of work are depicted as offered to or forced upon people within a household context only, and these opportunities are conceptualized as controlled by authoritarian male heads of household who were the ones with the power to decide and capacity to do things that mattered to household members. What happened outside households before the industrial revolution seems of little importance, nor is there much space left for the possible agency of household members other than the male head. Understanding the role played by multiple sources of income, and what such sources meant for household hierarchies, is the topic of this chapter. New research has shown that both women and men had many sources of income long before 1900, and that these sources were not only located ‘inside’ the household. Other chapters in this book demonstrate the importance of, for example, labour migration, warfare and the commercial provision of care work, situations of work that brought people from different households into contact with each other. We now know that there was a cultural expectation for adult women and men to take active responsibility for the survival of their households, an expectation that corresponded with everyday practice and that

4 5

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Steven Ruggles, ‘The future of historical family demography’, Annual Review of Sociology 38 (2012), 423–441, 435. In the Low Countries, inter-generational co-residence was already an exception in the early modern period. See, e.g., Manon van der Heijden and Ariadne Schmidt, ‘Der Haushalt in der niederländischen Geschichtsschreibung: Ehemuster, fragliches Patriarchat und häusliches Leben’, in Joachim Eibach and Inken Schmidt-Voges (eds.), Das Haus in der Geschichte Europas. Ein Handbuch (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 131–48. Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Robert James Bast, Honor your Fathers. Catechisms and the Emergence of a Patriarchal Ideology in Germany, 1400–1600 (Leiden: Brill, 1997).

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challenges the idea that wives simply submitted to the authority of their husbands.7 Finally, we know that households were not all alike; they differed in size, in access to resources, and in their connectedness to surrounding communities. Despite these insights, there are recent examples of economic history that dismiss the role of multiple sources of income. It is problematic to assume that by-employment does not have to be taken into serious account because ‘where by-employment data do exist, they suggest that flows between sectors occurred in both directions, with only a relatively small net effect’.8 The net effect is not, however, the most important aspect. It would be more interesting to find ways of measuring the extent and complexity of byemployments. In this context, we need more research on male flexibility, on upper-class flexibility and on how ideas about patriarchal household order could co-exist with at times considerable female agency. Not least, married men’s and women’s managerial work and responsibility for everyday household administration – phenomena that the term ‘two-supporter model’ seeks to capture – need to be acknowledged and incorporated into the standard narratives.9 The second section of this chapter offers a brief reflection on the source situation. The third section marshalls quantitative evidence to emphasize that far from everyone lived in households with enough land to be self-sufficient. Proletarianization was widespread in many parts of early modern Europe. While many lacked the land with which they could support themselves, they were not fulltime wage workers either. In the fourth section, collections of early modern letters are used to illustrate what multiple sources of income could mean in everyday life, but the letters will also help us establish the important distinction between large and relatively well-to-do households, who could choose to branch out, and small and vulnerable households that could only just make shift. The fifth section builds on the concept of the ‘twosupporter model’ to analyse women’s work and its insertion in social networks. Finally, the sixth section discusses the implications for grand economic narratives of both multiple sources of income and women’s economic and legal agency.

7 8

9

See, for instance, Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities. Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 42–50. Stephen Broadberry, Bruce M. S. Campbell, Alexander Klein, Mark Overton and Bas van Leeuwen, British Economic Growth 1270–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 345–48, quotation at 345. For this term, see Sofia Ling, Karin Hassan Jansson, Marie Lennersand, Christopher Pihl and Maria Ågren, ‘Marriage and work: Intertwined sources of agency and authority’, in Maria Ågren (ed.), Making a Living, Making a Difference: Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 81–88.

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Households in Historical Sources The term ‘household’ is invested with several different meanings in the historiography. First, it is used to designate a set of people grouped together in for instance ecclesiastical or fiscal documents and, consequently, is observable and countable in such sources. Secondly, it refers to precisely such a set of people with the added assumption that these people did things with each other and for each other (typically eating, sleeping and working under the same roof ). Thirdly, when used about the early modern period, ‘household’ is linked to yet other assumptions about a certain type of order predicated on hierarchy along lines of age and gender. In this last sense, the ‘household’ figures as a prototype for both real-life households (senses one and two) and for society as a whole. Fourthly, ‘household’ can refer to a material place of residence, similar if not completely synonymous with ‘house’ and ‘home’. This aspect comes to the fore when we think of households as places that provide shelter and security against threats from dangerous animals, bad weather and hostile people.10 It is worth emphasizing that historians very seldom have complete information on these four household aspects at the same time. Historians piece together information from various sources, but this is often a complicated operation involving some guesswork. It is particularly difficult to know who did what type of work (the second aspect). Often, early modern sources foreground activities in which states had a tax interest while remaining silent on activities of small fiscal importance. For example, when the Spanish eighteenth-century state collected information on how people made a living, most householders did not ‘declare the occupations of their wives or children. They were not asked to do so, since any subsistence wages earned by wives and children could not be taxed.’11 As the introduction to this article showed, the third aspect is often strongly emphasized in the literature. Early modern households are portrayed as sites of hierarchy along lines of age and gender. Partly, this emphasis reflects the way in which households were portrayed in prescriptive sources of the time. Advice literature, religious teachings and legal rules all foregrounded order and hierarchy. Partly, this emphasis finds support in observations of practice. It is an undeniable fact that heads of households exercised authority. At the same time, 10

11

Julie Hardwick also underlines the ‘multiple meanings of household (ménage)’. Julie Hardwick, The Practice of Patriarchy. Gender and the Politics of Household Authority in Early Modern France (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 78. Cf. Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988) and Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, 30. Carmen Sarasúa, ‘Women’s work and structural change: Occupational structure in eighteenthcentury Spain’, Economic History Review 72:2 (2019), 481–509, 483.

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other observations of practice suggest that the exercise of household authority could take many different forms and also be challenged both from within and from outside the household.12 This is particularly clear if we look at sustenance activities in households that did not have enough land to be self-sufficient in food. Whether rich or poor, members of such households interacted with others across household borders. It is not always easy to spot these interactions in historical sources; one attraction of the letters used below lies in their revelation of networking. But first, the decreasing degree of self-sufficiency will be discussed. Increasing Reliance on Sources of Income Other Than Agriculture The distinction between those who produced food and those who did other things is central to the topic of how households supported themselves. To the former group, questions about forms of land tenure, inheritance laws and fathers’ scope for transferring property at their discretion obviously mattered.13 Such questions may have been less relevant to the latter group for whom access to food markets and labour markets may have been more important. E. A. Wrigley has shown how, in England, France and the Dutch Republic, the latter group – the part of the population that did not primarily produce food – increased over the early modern period. The increase was most pronounced in England (Table 1.1).14 The share of the population occupied in food production (primary sector) is central to historical accounts of economic growth, since a decrease in the primary sector suggests that those engaged in agriculture are able to support more people, who in turn can do other things than produce their own food. It is not sufficient, however, for the agricultural sector theoretically to be able to produce enough food to allow the rest of the population to stay alive. It also has to be possible for the rest of the population to purchase the food produced within the agricultural sector. As pointed out by several writers, this was not self-evidently the case in early modern European societies. For various reasons, people did not always move seamlessly from making a living in the primary sector only, to making a living in the secondary and third sectors 12

13 14

Julie Hardwick, Family Business: Litigation and the Political Economies of Daily Life in Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Beatrice Zucca Micheletto, ‘Husbands, masculinity, male work and household economy in eighteenth-century Italy: the case of Turin’, Gender and History 27:3 (2015), 752–72. Cf. Ruggles, ‘Future of historical family demography’. E. Anthony Wrigley, ‘Urban growth and agricultural change: England and the Continent in the early modern period’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 15:4 (1985), 683–728, especially tables 4, 8 and 9.

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Table 1.1. Proportion of male population not engaged in agricultural production Year

England

France

Dutch Republic

1500 1600 1700 1750 1800

24 30 45 54 64

27 31 37 39 41

40 50 60 57 56

Source: Wrigley, ‘Urban Growth’, tables 4, 8 and 9. Wrigley’s tables have two decimals, but here the figures have been rounded.

only.15 One’s labour could be superfluous in the primary sector but not yet in demand in the secondary and tertiary ones. For this reason, increasing numbers of people had to rely on combinations of sources of income in the early modern period: proto-industry, production of crops for the market, casual wage work and many other forms of income. Work opportunities were also created by early modern states in their administrative bureaucracies and military organizations, but states also destroyed work opportunities. Finding sources of income could also involve short- and long-distance migration.16 The numerical growth of those who relied on many sources of income is arguably the most important factor of change in the early modern period. This growth is underestimated in Table 1.1, as it does not take into account women’s work and its sectoral distribution.17 More and more women and men were neither self-sufficient peasants nor fulltime wage workers. Estimates of exactly how many people were engaged in multiple employments are, however, uncertain because of the imperfections of historical sources. A recent long-term survey of England and Germany argues that the ‘subpeasant classes’ were already significant in the middle ages; depending on region, between 20 and 60 per cent of the English and German populations are assumed to have belonged to this stratum in the fifteenth century, and they continued to grow up until 1750 and 1800, respectively.18 Observations in other parts of Europe confirm that regional variation could be substantial and 15

16 17 18

Charles Tilly, ‘Demographic origins of the European proletariat’, in David Levine (ed.), Proletarianization and Family History (London: Academic Press, 1984), 13–14; Maria Ågren, Jord och gäld. Social skiktning och rättslig konflikt i södra Dalarna ca 1650–1850 (Uppsala: Studia Historica Upsaliensia, 1992), 31. See the chapters on war (Chapter 7), rural industry (Chapter 4), agriculture (Chapter 3) and mobility (Chapter 6). Cf. Sarasúa, ‘Women’s work’. Sami Ghosh, ‘Rural economies and transitions to capitalism: Germany and England compared (c.1200–c.1800)’, Journal of Agrarian Change 16:2 (2016), 255–90.

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that levels could be high.19 This is clearly a field where much more research is needed. Nevertheless, even in the absence of such research, increasing social stratification and the growing need to find novel sources of income are plausible and provide a general framework within which early modern women’s and men’s economic contributions should be understood. In fact, Wrigley explicitly pointed out (in 1985) that men combined primary and secondary sector work, suggesting flexibility and multiple employments.20 He did not, however, mention the flexible work of women and whether or not such work mattered in the transition from one sector to another. Once again, we have to remind ourselves of how historical sources give a partial view of households, foregrounding men’s work.21 Household size is often an indicator of access to resources. It is interesting, therefore, that the majority of early modern European households were single households (rather than stem or joint households). A size between four and five was common in rural areas, and this was true of Eastern Europe and large parts of Southern Europe too.22 In cities, the size was smaller (Table 1.2). In general, large rural households with a male head tended to be wealthy. By contrast, small urban households and households with female heads tended to be less wealthy. The most vulnerable were single women, some of whom lived in ‘spinster clusters’. Single women were initially more common in north-western than in southern Europe but, as their share increased everywhere (mainly in the eighteenth century), the geographic differences became less pronounced. The prevalence of single women and, consequently, very small households, can indicate increasing difficulties for women and their

19

20 21 22

Tilly, ‘Demographic origins’, 36, suggests 30 per cent of ‘proletarians’ in the whole of Europe in the sixteenth century and 67 per cent around 1800. See also Cathy A. Frierson, ‘Peasants and rural laborers’, in Peter N. Stearns (ed.), Encyclopedia of European Social History: From 1350 to 2000 (New York: Scribner, 2001), 149–63, and Olwen Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France 1750–1789 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 23, 37 (both on different parts of France, ranging between 40 and 90 per cent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries); Jonas Lindström, ‘Labouring poor in early modern Sweden?’, Scandinavian Journal of History 44:4 (2019), 403–29 (on various regions in Sweden, ranging between 10 and 50 per cent in the seventeenth century); Juan Carmona, Joan R. Rosés and James Simpson, ‘The question of land access and the Spanish land reform of 1932’, Economic History Review 72:2 (2019), 669–90 (57 per cent for Spain in 1860). Tilly’s numbers are based on theoretical modelling. The other numbers are based on primary sources but it is not always clear if they comprise both landless and semi-landless or landless only. Wrigley, ‘Urban growth’, 697. Jane Humphries and Carmen Sarasúa, ‘Off the record: Reconstructing women’s labor force participation in the European past’, Feminist Economics 18:4 (2012), 39–67. Mikołaj Szołtysek, ‘Households and family systems’, in Hamish Scott (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350–1750, vol. 1, Peoples and Place (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 313–41, especially 333.

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Table 1.2. Examples of mean household sizes in early modern Europe

Area a

Norfolk Trevisob Villafrancac Tuscanyc Valenciennesd Wildberge West Brabantf Montes de Pasg Near Zürichh Dalai Poland–Lithuania, westj Poland–Lithuania, middlej Poland–Lithuania, eastj Maaslandf Lorcak Coventrya Florencel Perugiac Prevezam Prevezam Leidenf Delftf Reimsd

Rural/Urban

Mean

No. of households Time

Country

Rural Rural Rural Rural Rural Rural Rural Rural Rural Rural Rural Rural Rural Rural Rural and urban Urban Urban Urban Urban Urban Urban Urban Urban

4.85 5.9 4.4 5.4 4.5 4.1 4.2–4.9 4.5 6.09 4.48 5.27 4.84 5.01 4.58 4.09 3.8 5.66 3.9 4.24 4.36 3.62 3.47 3.2

– – – – – – – 1,367 85 301 8,228 5,458 1,259 – – 1,300 – – 53 390 – – –

England Italy Italy Italy France Württemberg The Netherlands Spain Switzerland Sweden Poland, Belarus Poland, Belarus Poland, Belarus The Netherlands Spain England Italy Italy Greece Greece The Netherlands The Netherlands France

1557 1564–1599 1622 1670 1693 c.1720 1750 1752 1770/80 1780 Late 18th c. Late 18th c. Late 18th c. 1800 1797 1523 1552 1652 1719 1780 1749 1749 Late 18th c.

Sources: a Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities. Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 31. b Giuliano Galletti, Bocche e biade: Popolazione e famiglie nelle campagne trevigiane dei secoli XV e XVI (Treviso, Canova: Fondazione Benetton, 1994), 53. c Giovanna Da Molin, Famiglia e matrimonio nell’ Italia del Seicento (Bari: Cacucci, 2002). d Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux, ‘Marriage, widowhood, and divorce’ in David I. Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli (eds.), Family Life in Early Modern Times 1500–1789 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 221–56. e Sheilagh Ogilvie, A Bitter Living: Women, Markets, and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 199. f D. J. Noordam, ‘Gezins- en huishoudensstructuren in het achttiende-eeuwse Leiden’, in H. A. Diederiks, D. J. Noordam and H. D. Tjalsma (eds.), Armoede en sociale spanning. Sociaal-histoirsche studies over Leiden in de achttiende eeuw (Hilversum: Verloren, 1985), 87–104, especially 90. g Carmen Sarasúa, ‘Understanding intra-family inequalities: the Montes de Pas, Spain, 1700–1900’, History of the Family 3:2 (1998), 173–97. h Ulrich Pfister, ‘Women’s bread – men’s capital’, History of the Family 6:2 (2001), 147–66. i Christer Winberg, Folkökning och proletarisering. Kring den sociala strukturomvandlingen på Sveriges landsbygd under den agrara revolutionen (Gothenburg: Gothenburg University, 1975), 300. j Mikołaj Szołtysek, ‘Three kinds of preindustrial household formation system in historical Eastern Europe: A challenge to spatial patterns of the European family’, History of the Family 13:3 (2008), 223–57. k Francisco C. Jiménez and Joaquin R. Valverde, ‘Marriage, work, and social reproduction in one area of southern Europe at the end of the 18th century: Lorca (1797)’, History of the Family 7:3 (2002), 397–421. l David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Les Toscans et leurs familles. Une étude du Catasto florentin de 1427 (Paris: EHESS, 1978). m Kostas Komis, ‘Demographic aspects of the Greek household: the case of Preveza (18th century)’, History of the Family 9:3 (2004), 287–98.

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dependents to make a living, but it can also be a sign that women found it easier to support themselves on their own.23 The presence of relatively small and resource-poor households fits with a widespread need in society to draw on many sources of income. But the ubiquity of multiple sources of income was not only an effect of social stratification. As Jane Whittle has stressed, ‘the idea that by-employment is indicative of a risk-averse peasant mentality [. . .] needs dramatic modification’.24 For instance, the relatively large households in the countryside outside Zürich were headed by male textile entrepreneurs, and had many servants and access to farm land (see Table 1.2). The individual household members were engaged in different economic pursuits and the households therefore had many sources of income. Bread baked by women played an important role for the household economy. The socio-economic realities behind a lack of specialization could be many but, when we unveil them, women’s work often becomes apparent. It is advisable to avoid using the term ‘makeshift’ since it signals precariousness only. Instead, ‘multiple sources of income’ is a more neutral and therefore better term for what must have been a feature of most early modern households. In scholarship on the Habsburg Empire (for example, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola), the term ‘integrated peasant economy’ has been proposed to cover the role diversification played for households’ survival. This term presupposes the combination of subsistence activities and income sources that belong to all three economic sectors (although their relative weight may vary). In contradistinction to a model where people are assumed to move ineluctably from one economic sector to another, and where such sectoral change is identified with economic growth, the concept of ‘integrated peasant economies’ instead suggests that the economy is adaptable and resilient precisely because of its lack of specialization. ‘Integrated’ signals both integration of several sources of income and integration of the household in the surrounding world.25 The combination of sources of income turns into a strength, and the combination presupposes openness to and engagement with other households.

23

24

25

Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘Singlewomen in medieval and early modern Europe: The demographic perspective’, in Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (eds.), Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 38–81, 55–56. Jane Whittle, ‘By-employment, women’s work and “unproductive” households’, in Mark Overton, Jane Whittle, Andrew Hann and Darron Dean (eds.), Production and Consumption in English Households 1600–1750 (London: Routledge, 2004), 65–86, 77. Sebastian A. J. Keibeck, ‘By-employments in early modern England and their significance for estimating historical male occupational structures’, Cambridge Working Papers in Economic and Social History 29 (2017) shows that the male by-employment visible in nearly 2,000 English probate inventories from the period 1560 to 1760 was biased towards the more wealthy. Panjek, ‘Integrated peasant economy’.

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Even if ‘integrated peasant economy’ may initially seem unhelpful in understanding the highly commercialized realities of, for instance, early modern London and Amsterdam, it offers an alternative to the model that people (men) had one occupation only and that a change of occupation meant that they moved completely and irreversibly from one sector to another. A more plausible model would be that men and women had many sources of income spread out over several different sectors and over the lifecycle. Sectoral change happened slowly precisely because of the integrated and complex character of economic life. Processes of change could also be reversed, that is, people working in the secondary and tertiary sectors could start investing more time in agriculture when this became possible, probably because land continued to hold a special attraction.26 There is a need for more research that takes multiple sources of income seriously. Multiple Sources of Income: Two Examples While difficult to study systematically, the role of many sources of income and integration in the surrounding society can be illustrated and understood with the help of early modern letter writers. In the latter half of the seventeenth century, Michael Gyldenstolpe and his wife Susanna Nilsdotter headed a large household in the small Swedish town of Åbo (today Turku in Finland). They had 12 children together, 9 of whom reached adulthood. In 1640, Michael was appointed professor at the university in Åbo. In the 1660s, two of their sons were starting careers as civil servants in Stockholm while a third son was soon to become an army officer. From these years, letters between the father and the sons have been preserved.27 Despite their relatively elevated social position, the family had economic problems. According to the father, these problems could be attributed to his inadequate salary and the fact that payment was often delayed; in 1662 Gyldenstolpe was still waiting for compensation for the years 1652, 1658, 1659, 1660 and 1661.28 These delays were effects of the Swedish state’s poor financial situation, and the Gyldenstolpe family was not the only one affected. To make things worse, Gyldenstolpe’s responsibilities were not limited to teaching in Åbo; he also had to take an active part in the judiciary which forced him to make long and tiring travels on horseback. This work was 26

27

28

Regina Grafe, ‘Economic and social trends’, in Hamish Scott (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350–1750, vol. 1, Peoples and Place (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 269–94. Annika Ström, ‘Inledning’, in Annika Ström (ed.), Professor Michael Wexionius Gyldenstolpes brev till sonen Nils 1660–1669. Utgåva av latinsk text med översättning (Stockholm: Kungl. Samfundet för utgivande av handskrifter rörande Skandinaviens historia, 2014), Handlingar 37. Ström (ed.), Gyldenstolpes brev, letter 23, 27 March 1662, p. 193.

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also poorly remunerated. Moreover, as the salary was paid partly in kind, that is, in the form of grain produced at tenant farms, these tenants had to be equipped with animals and supervised so as to prevent embezzlement. Through his letters, the father stayed in close contact with his sons, and Nils in particular, since he was to have increasingly influential positions in the state administration. The letters often include detailed instructions for Nils on how to approach high government officials, which arguments to use to further the family’s various interests and how much money to dispense in order to make men in power take a benevolent view of the father’s case. Apparently, Nils was successful in this respect and, with time, the father was asking for rather than giving advice. Moreover, people in and around Åbo now began approaching the father with their grievances, asking him to forward these to his well-placed son in Stockholm who was believed to be in a position to help.29 But help still went in the other direction. The parents sent boots, fish and butter to their sons, and the father instructed one: ‘Your meticulousness in carrying out my orders is most dear to me . . . If there is anything left of the pike, do keep it and sell it in small parts for any necessary expenses [you may have]’.30 While the preserved letters are mainly between the father and Nils, it is clear that the mother, who was a vicar’s daughter, also wrote to their sons and took an interest in their lives. She was also actively involved in the management of the tenant farms and expressed concern about their poor state. Her responsibilities for the household forced her to travel both within Finland and to Stockholm where she carried out errands. Her economic assets had been important when the household was set up in 1637, as she brought a number of inherited farms into the marital economy. And she continued to be actively engaged in economic matters: like her husband, she acted as guarantor for people who needed security for loans.31 Michael stresses Susanna’s importance in two letters: the spouses cannot be away from their home at the same time, he explains, even if this unfortunately means that they cannot visit their sons together: Our economy, that is, building and agriculture (just to mention a few things), has suffered great damage both in town and in the countryside, as I was delayed last summer [1666] in the duchy of Vasaborg, and I was in Österbotten in 1665 and spent all of the summer 1664 in Stockholm. So, therefore, my dear wife and I could not [now]

29

30 31

Ström (ed.), Gyldenstolpes brev, letter 29, 23 April 1663; letter 40, 17 November 1664; letter 41, 17 December 1664; letter 42, 5 May 1665; letter 43, 24 May 1665; letter 79, 8 July 1668, pp. 209, 226, 227, 230, 293. Ström (ed.), Gyldenstolpes brev, letter 47, 21 October 1665, p. 237. Ström (ed.), Gyldenstolpes brev, letter 22, 13 March 1662; letter 24, 1 May 1662; letter 29, 23 April 1663; letter 34, 27 April 1664; letter 88, 7 March 1669, pp. 190, 198, 207, 217, 305.

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desert the household both at the same time without it suffering irreparable damage, especially as we still do not have a replacement for Bertel, the warden.32

The letters between father and sons point to a number of key characteristics of early modern households. First, the household was dependent on a wide variety of sources of income and could not rely on what the father received (or should rightfully have received) from his profession alone. Moreover, what he did receive was partly paid in kind, forcing the whole family to engage in trade in agricultural and other local products (such as fish). They did not till the soil themselves, this was the job of the tenant farmers but, in order to assert their rights and avoid being cheated, they had to know how to run a farm. In brief, they were active in both the primary and tertiary sectors. Secondly, the household’s survival was predicated on social and economic contacts that transcended the household’s borders. Both parents and older children travelled between their urban home and the farms from which their agricultural produce came and the father travelled over large parts of Finland to carry out tasks that we may think of as his by-employments. The letters to the sons and other acquaintances in Stockholm were essential to protect the household’s interests and, by letting other people in and around Åbo send their requests through this channel, the father’s position and honour were upheld and strengthened. When the eldest son Gabriel died in Riga (Latvia) and had to be buried there, it was friends and associates who took care of the ceremony since the family was unable to attend. Thirdly, the household could not function unless at least one of the parents was at home. The mother could stand in for the father, and vice versa, but they could not both be away at the same time. The differentiated and time-consuming character of the economy required the time and skills of at least two adults. The purpose of the activities undertaken by all household members was for everyone to thrive, but this had a broader meaning than just having bread on the table. It also involved securing the well-being of the next generation. Michael Gyldenstolpe’s concerns about how to provide all sons with income should be seen in this light, but so should his interest in giving the daughters a good upbringing. He wanted to uphold his and his family’s honour precisely because, as he wrote in one letter to Nils, ‘this usually counts as one of the most valuable legacies from a father: the honorable reputation of ancestors and parents’.33 He was distraught that Gabriel’s salary was not posthumously paid out because this meant that his son’s honour would not be upheld vis-á-vis his

32 33

Ström (ed.), Gyldenstolpes brev, letter 68, 8 May 1667, p. 272. Similar formulation in letter 66, 13 April 1667, p. 268. Ström (ed.), Gyldenstolpes brev, letter 22, 13 March 1662, p. 188.

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creditors. In the same way, he feared that his own problems with tardy payments of salary might tarnish his reputation. Almost a century later in England (in 1755), a woman by the name of Jane Cross wrote a letter to the churchwarden of her home parish asking for help. Jane had moved with her little son to Canterbury to live with her mother. The mother was glad to receive her daughter but apparently unable to support her because of old age. Jane for her part stressed that she did not want to be a burden on her mother and that she desired to ‘labour for my self and my child but its not in my power to subsist with my own labour I therefore appeal to your great Goodness’. She added that, if the churchwarden would not give her any help, she would have to send her son to the home parish ‘for its for him that I desire an allowance as to my self I will work freely’. She ended her letter by asking the warden to send half a guinea to a named pub in London ‘for mr Talbutt hyeman to canterbury [to pick up]’.34 Jane Cross had much in common with a poor person in eighteenth-century France who ‘could manage if he was young, single, employed, and in good bodily health’.35 If these conditions were unfulfilled, if for instance there was a child or several, the adult would have to seek relief in the form of handouts from the church, the village community, institutional support (hôpitaux généraux) or informal help.36 By contrast, she seems to have been in a situation very different from that of Michael Gyldenstolpe. There are, however, a number of important similarities between Jane Cross and the Finnish professor. They both wrote letters to better their economic situation, asking others – a son, a warden – to intercede for them. They were both dependent on others’ willingness to extend help. They were both preoccupied with honour, whether it was based on payment of debts or the capacity to labour for oneself. They were both committed to promoting the well-being of the next generation. Finally, they both relied on at least two sources of income, in Jane Cross’s case her own labour and the relief she received from her home parish. The difference between them was in quantity rather than quality: Gyldenstolpe had a large household and he had a wife who contributed to the family economy, he had more sources of income than just two, and with his son in Stockholm he was better connected than Jane Cross. Hers was a very small and resource-poor household. Quantities matter. They show that, while these people had many things in common, their lives and their reliance on multiple sources of income had very different meanings. Multiple sources of income can be a sign of wealth, 34

35

Thomas Sokoll (ed.), Essex Pauper Letters 1731–1837, Records of Social and Economic History, New Series 30 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 292. See also Steven King, ‘Pauper letters as a source’, Family and Community History 10:2 (2007), 167–70. 36 Hufton, Poor, 23. Hufton, Poor, 131–216.

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stability and freedom of choice: if one source dries up temporarily, as did Gyldenstolpe’s salary, other sources can mitigate the effect, and if one source proves to yield more, then more time can be devoted to it. Multiple sources of income can also be a sign of precariousness: to have to shift from one job to another without ever being in control of one’s own economy. Households, Gender and Work Early modern households did not offer married women the restricted role of ‘homemaker’; instead, both husband and wife were expected to actively contribute to the survival of the household and its members. Spouses’ contributions could take many different forms, including property (land, movables, financial assets), labour (paid and unpaid) and other incomes (from, for instance, trade). Contributions also took the form of careful management of household resources, active protection of the interests of the household and exercise of authority over household members. This was true of agriculturally occupied households as well as of all other households.37 Michael Gyldenstolpe’s wife Susanna provides an illustrative example of the broad role married women could have. Early modern married women have often been assumed to have been hampered by childcare responsibilities and, to varying degrees, restricted legal capacity. Therefore, their economic activities are particularly important to note. Married women did all types of work tasks, and the difference between men’s and women’s work tasks was not pronounced.38 Their work often presupposed knowledge and skills, and could gain them status and authority, they worked both with other women and with men (their husbands and other men) and we know that previous quantitative estimates of married women’s labour force participation have been too low.39 We know that married

37

38 39

On the expectations that both spouses contributed to the household, see above all Heide Wunder, ‘Er ist die Sonn, sie ist der Mond’: Frauen in der Frühen Neuzeit (München: Beck, 1992). See Table 1.3 with references. For the general picture see Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England 1680–1780 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); on women’s labour force participation, see, e.g., Peter Earle, ‘The female labour market in London in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries’, Economic History Review 42 (1989), 328–53, and compare with Amy L. Erickson, ‘Married women’s occupations in eighteenth-century London’, Continuity and Change 23 (2008), 267–307. On married women’s access to positions of authority, see, e.g., Amy L. Erickson, ‘Mistresses and marriage: Or, a short history of the Mrs’, History Workshop Journal 78 (2014), 39–57; Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 214–31; Ling et al., ‘Marriage and work’, 80–102.

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(and other) women contributed capital to financial markets40 and we know that women had occupational identities.41 In families with few resources, survival depended crucially on the incomes contributed by wife (and children). If one of the spouses died, severe economic problems ensued.42 Against this backdrop, it is reasonable to assume that at least 50 per cent of all work carried out in early modern societies was carried out by women and that many of these female workers were married women.43 The main point about the early modern married woman is not, however, that she made economic contributions to her household. Instead, it is the ways in which married women could exercise de facto authority that should be in focus. It is this authority, in combination with the contributions of income and property, that justify us speaking of an early modern two-supporter model. This model was obscured by contemporary learned discourse and its emphasis on female subordination, an emphasis taken up by and further accentuated in much historiography. Thus, whenever a couple headed a household, the household is referred to as a male-headed household and only if the man is absent will the woman be described as the household head. Studies of the semantics of titles attributed to adult women suggest, however, that there was an acknowledgement of adult women’s capacity to govern.44 Another way of measuring married women’s de facto household authority is to look at how often and in which contexts they were described as managing the work of others. One study has shown that in eighteenth-century Sweden, women were in fact over-represented among those who were described as carrying out these types of work tasks; while women’s work activities comprised 22 per cent of the whole dataset in question, women’s managerial activities comprised 33 per cent of the subset describing managerial activities. When the managerial activities were divided into four groups (‘ordering’, ‘governing’, ‘assigning’, ‘asking’), women were over-represented in all of these categories except ‘ordering’. Married women clearly exercised authority in many different ways, just as married men did. What was even 40

41

42 43

44

Anne Laurence, Josephine Maltby and Janette Rutterford (eds.), Women and Their Money 1700–1950: Essays on Women and Finance (London: Taylor & Francis, 2008); Amy M. Froide, Silent Partners. Women as Public Investors During Britain’s Financial Revolution, 1690–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women in the crafts in sixteenth-century Lyon’, Feminist Studies 8:1 (1982), 47–80; Hardwick, Family Business, 103; Merry E. Wiesner, Working Women in Renaissance Germany (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 195. Hufton, Poor, 23–24, 37–39, 68. See Broadberry et al., British Economic Growth, 347–48 for the estimate 70/30 and compare Jane Whittle, ‘A critique of approaches to “domestic work”: Women, work and the preindustrial economy’, Past & Present 243 (2019), 35–70, and the Introduction to this book. Erickson, ‘Mistresses and marriage’, 39–57, 78; Christopher Pihl and Maria Ågren, ‘Vad var en hustru? Ett begreppshistoriskt bidrag till genushistorien’, Historisk Tidskrift 134:2 (2014), 170–90.

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more striking, however, was the correlation between household position and managerial activities. ‘Ever-married people carried out 87 percent of managerial activities where the marital status of the performer [was] known, compared with 13 percent for unmarried people.’ The conclusion drawn in the study is that women’s exercise of authority was closely related to their status as evermarried, and that the same was true for men.45 The conclusions of this study are supported by studies from other parts of Europe that apply a different methodology.46 Tables 1.3–1.5 build on three major studies that all use verb-phrases describing work activities as their main data type. Since the work categories were not constructed in exactly the same way in all three studies, comparing their sizes across countries is not advisable. It is safe, however, to conclude that the distinction between ever-married and unmarried women was important everywhere: women engaged in different sustenance activities depending on their household position, which in turn depended on marital status, age and gender.47 In both Sweden and England, the unmarried women were more visible in agriculture and transportation work than their shares in the samples would have us expect, suggesting that they actually did these types of work more often than the ever-married women. In Germany, likewise, unmarried women were conspicuously present in marginal occupations, unguilded crafts, agriculture and care work while the ever-married women instead tended to do guilded craft work, engage in commerce and carry out housework more often than their share in the sample would have us expect, suggesting that they actually did these things more often than the unmarried women. In England, the ever-married were often engaged in crafts and construction as well as in care work, whereas in Sweden, the ever-married women were conspicuous in various market activities (commerce, trade in real estate, credit, provision of food and accommodation) as well as in managerial work.

45

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Karin Hassan Jansson, Rosemarie Fiebranz and Ann-Catrin Östman, ‘Constitutive tasks: performances of hierarchy and identity’, in Maria Ågren (ed.), Making a Living, Making a Difference: Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 127–58, especially 141–43. Sheilagh Ogilvie, A Bitter Living: Women, Markets, and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 62–63, 153–54; Ariadne Schmidt, ‘Contested authority. Working women in leading positions in the early modern Dutch urban economy’, in Merridee L. Bailey, Tania M. Colwell and Julie Hotchin (eds.), Women and Work in Europe. Experiences, Relationships and Cultural Representation, c.1100–1800 (London: Routledge, 2018), 214–36, especially 230; Christine Werkstätter, Frauen in der Augsburger Zunfthantwerk: Arbeit, Arbeitsbeziehungen und Geschlechterverhältnisse in dem 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001). For the distinction ever-married/never-married, see Amy M. Froide, ‘Marital status as a category of difference’ in Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (eds.), Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 236–69.

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Table 1.3. Women’s presence in different work areas according to marital status. Sweden, 1550–1799 (per cent)

Sweden Distribution in whole sample Commerce Agriculture Administrative work Trade in real estate Managerial work Credit activities Food, accommodation Care Transport Crafts, construction Total, selected areas of work

Activities by ever-married women N = 1,338

Activities by unmarried women N = 400

77 91 57 94 100 89 91 86 78 52 75

23 9 43 6 0 11 9 14 22 48 25

Total number of observations N = 1,738

290 178 177 162 157 104 103 101 101 59 1,432

Source: Jonas Lindström, Karin Hassan Jansson, Rosemarie Fiebranz, Benny Jacobsson and Maria Ågren, ‘Mistress or maid: The structure of women’s work in Sweden, 1550–1800’, Continuity and Change 32:2 (2017), table 3. Six categories of work were not included in this table because of small sizes or unspecified character of the observations.

These figures suggest, first, that work was very diverse: women did many different things.48 Secondly, they show that, in most forms of work, it made a great difference whether or not you were or had been married. In practice, the important difference was often that between the ever-married and the nevermarried, not between widows and all other women.49 Consequently, it is not surprising that marriage was attractive to women as well as to men. The reason for the relative popularity of marriage was that it conferred a number of material and symbolic resources upon spouses, resources that they had reason to value because it made it easier to make a living. The power to deploy the labour of younger, subordinate household members was obviously one such resource, as shown in Tables 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5. The power to represent the household in public – in the marketplace, at court – was another highly interesting resource since it was connected with honour and creditworthiness. 48 49

This conclusion would have become even stronger if we had taken all categories of work into account: 14 in the German case, 16 in the Swedish case, and 10 in the English case. See Shepard, Accounting for Oneself, 219, 223, 230, for the same conclusion. In some categories of work, the distinction currently married/widowed does seem to have mattered though. See, e.g., Jane Whittle and Mark Hailwood, ‘The gender division of labour in early modern England’, Economic History Review 73:1 (2020), 3–32, especially 20, on widows in care work.

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Table 1.4. Women’s presence in different work areas according to marital status. Southern Germany, 1646–1800 (per cent)

Southern Germany Distribution in whole sample Agriculture Housework Marginal occupations Care Unguilded crafts Proto-industry Guilded craft Commerce Labour Service Total, selected areas of work

Activities by ever-married women N = 571

Activities by unmarried women N = 243

70 66 80 49 68 60 80 91 85 79 82

30 34 20 51 32 40 20 9 15 21 18

Total number of observations N = 814

212 171 96 88 65 25 22 20 19 11 729

Source: Sheilagh Ogilvie, A Bitter Living: Women, Markets, and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), tables 3.10, 3.13, 4.1 and 5.1. ‘Unmarried women’ includes unmarried female offspring and female servants. Work by independent unmarried women has been excluded for reasons of comparability, and so have small categories of work.

Table 1.5. Women’s presence in different work areas according to marital status. Southern England, 1500–1699 (per cent)

Southern England Distribution in whole sample Commerce Housework Agriculture Crafts, construction Transport Care Food processing Management Total, selected areas of work

Activities by ever-married women N = 667

Activities by unmarried women N = 155

81 83 79 74 90 72 91 83 83

19 17 21 26 10 28 9 17 17

Total number of observations N = 822

244 140 123 71 71 64 53 52 818

Source: Jane Whittle and Mark Hailwood, ‘The gender division of labour in early modern England’, Economic History Review 73 (2020), 3–32, table 13. Small categories of work have not been included.

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Households were often the institution that channelled resources to people and marriage was the way in which people could be promoted within this institution. Even if it was generally attractive to become a head of household, households differed with respect to how many resources the head could command (as the comparison between Gyldenstolpe and Cross illustrated). Whether or not there was a desire to restrict the wife’s power over these resources probably depended on the wealth of the family and may have been more pronounced in very affluent families than in less resource-rich ones. As Linda Pollock pointed out in a discussion about elite girls’ education, ‘the problem for early modern society was not that of producing women endowed with the abilities of men, but that of transforming girls into the ideal of femininity depicted in the scriptures’.50 It was not a problem to teach upper class women what they had to know as estate managers because both boys and girls learned this by observing their parents in their daily activities. Girls were as capable as boys in this respect. The problem was subsequently to inculcate into young elite women a sense of when they should refrain from using their knowledge and from claiming authority for themselves. Married women’s role in the household was therefore marked by a tension between the expectation that they could and should act on their own, and the expectation that they should defer to their husbands. While failed inculcation of submissiveness could be a problem, so was its opposite. It was seldom in the interest of the husband to have a wife who was too submissive and meek because such a wife could not monitor the workforce and protect the household’s resources against domestic theft. Denying wives the capacity to act on their own was a particular problem in families that made a living from trade,51 but would have had adverse effects for any family.52 One person was unable to be in several places at the same time and there was a need for two adults to manage the household (as Gyldenstolpe emphasized in one of his letters). Like husbands, wives had to be able to exercise authority legitimately beyond the household too. Those associated with the family – creditors, employers, employees, clients – had an interest in having two clearly defined people who could speak for the household. At the same time, wives’ authority could create tensions if it was unclear to outsiders (such as creditors and law courts) who in fact was in charge and who could be relied upon to honour the 50 51 52

Linda Pollock, ‘“Teach her to live under obedience”: The making of women in the upper ranks of early modern England’, Continuity and Change 4:2 (1989), 231–58, especially 237. Susanne Schötz, Handelsfrauen in Leipzig. Zur Geschichte von Arbeit und Geschlecht in der Neuzeit (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2004), 60–61. Bernard Capp, ‘Separate domains? Women and authority in early modern England’, in Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle (eds.), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (London: Macmillan, 1996), 17–45. See also Barbara J. Harris, English Aristocratic Women 1450–1550 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

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household’s commitments. In many countries, law courts operated on the default assumption that a married woman acted in accordance with her husband’s wishes, unless he explicitly disavowed her.53 This attitude reflects a recognition that both husband and wife had to shoulder responsibilities and have access to legitimate authority, but does not mean that the value of married women’s contributions and responsibilities was always openly acknowledged.54 There was a tension between the expectation of deference and the expectation of assertiveness. The spousal unit worked according to principles that can be conceptualized as deputizing. Historians have often recognized the capacity of early modern wives to be ‘deputy husbands’, meaning her ability to step into the shoes of her husband when he was ill or away from home.55 But deputizing could go in the other direction as well. In countries where married women could own property, husbands acted as deputies of their wives. As long as there was no indication of the wife disavowing the husband’s actions, such deputizing was accepted, but not otherwise. Eighteenth-century Norwegian law court cases show examples of wives who publicly disclaimed the validity of land sales made by their husbands.56 In Portugal, public offices were handled as a form of property, and women could inherit such offices and then let male relatives execute them. Still, women were not simply conduits of property: it ‘may be more accurate to say that a woman lent her inherited office to her husband’.57 As we learn more about these practices, we may come to need the term ‘deputy wife’. Being a de facto head of household was valuable not only because the position could come with social esteem and material resources (even if this was not always the case). It could also provide opportunities to exercise skills and develop capacities. The experience of actually being in charge was different from merely being the helper, advisor or delegate of someone else, who had the full responsibility. Often, people learn new things and nurture new sides to

53

54 55

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See, for instance, Carol Gold, ‘On the streets and in the markets: Independent Copenhagen saleswomen’, in Deborah Simonton and Anne Montenach (eds.), Female Agency in the Urban Economy: Gender in European Towns, 1640–1830 (London: Routledge, 2013), 38, citing the work of Inger Dübeck: ‘The agreement could be tacit or articulated and could be presumptively deduced from his silence.’ Shepard, Accounting for Oneself, 175. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750 (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2010), 9; Heijden and Schmidt, ‘Der Haushalt’, 138. Hilde Sandvik, ‘Decision-making on marital property in Norway, 1500–1800’, in Maria Ågren and Amy L. Erickson (eds.), The Marital Economy in Scandinavia and Britain 1400–1900 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 111–26, 116–17. Darlene Abreu-Ferreira, ‘Women and the acquisition, transmission, and execution of public offices in early modern Portugal’, Gender and History 31:2 (2019), 383–403, quotation at 394.

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their character as they take charge. This is not to say that the new sides represent desirable human qualities; responsibility and authority may corrupt. However, not being allowed to be in charge and take responsibility inhibits human development.58 The eighteenth-century married woman who, on her way to the urban market, learnt that the price of grain had gone down and instantly decided not to sell and turned back home, without first consulting her husband, bears witness to the importance of understanding information, acting upon it and thereby taking responsibility.59 It is important to keep in mind that the domestic character of women’s work was not at all pronounced and much of what people did brought them outside of their homes.60 This was true also of the work done by unmarried women and men in subordinate positions. Agricultural work often took place outdoors, unguilded work and services could be carried out in other people’s houses and ‘marginal work’ including gathering – an outdoor activity – and running errands for others meant moving around (cf. Tables 1.3–1.5). In practice, children and servants were used as representatives of their heads-of-household and this exposed them too to new situations and challenges that helped them develop various skills. The openness of households helps us understand not only economic life but learning environments as well. It is easy to make faulty assumptions about women’s work in the distant past, partly because of the sources and partly because of the ways in which the male breadwinner model gained prominence in the nineteenth-century and eclipsed the realities of married women’s work.61 It is, however, also easy to make faulty assumptions about men’s work. Men too were engaged in multiple sources of income,62 and only gradually were their identities linked to one occupation only.63 Men did have occupational titles more often than women did, particularly in urban contexts, but such titles can be deceptive. They suggest fulltime employment and specialization in a way that was often far

58 59 60 61 62

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Vegard Iversen, ‘Intra-household inequality: A challenge for the capability approach?’, Feminist Economics 9 (2003), 93–115, 102. Uppsala Landsarkiv, Uppsala, Sweden, Accisrätten Västerås, 28 September 1757. Ogilvie, Bitter Living, 118, 282–83. See, e.g., Nancy Folbre, ‘The unproductive housewife: Her evolution in nineteenth-century economic thought’, Signs 16:3 (1991), 463–484. Natasha Korda, Labors Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 27; Ogilvie, Bitter Living, 116–17, 142–43, 208–10; Jonas Lindström, Rosemarie Fiebranz and Göran Rydén, ‘The diversity of work’, in Maria Ågren (ed.), Making a Living, Making a Difference: Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 24–46, 30; Whittle and Hailwood, ‘Gender division of labour’. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (London: Routledge, 2002), 272.

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from reality.64 Men’s work could also be ‘episodic’ and ‘casual’ rather than fulltime, marked by periods of unemployment.65 And, just as for women, marriage was very important to men’s working lives as it affected their chances of supporting themselves and their families.66 Engagement in many different economic activities was common, then, and involved cooperating with other members of the community and sharing tasks between households. In one rural area of Sweden marked by metal production, for instance, labouring families were dependent on their employer for their wages, for credit and for the right to use material resources he owned. In addition, they were engaged in pastoral farming and had to exploit far-off meadows and pastures. This presupposed sharing of responsibilities. Some had to be away from home while others stayed behind. In this context, married women could take care of children and dairy production but they could also transport goods and sell beer, liquor, tobacco, birch-bark, plants, cheese, eggs and home-made fabric.67 In other contexts, cooperating across household borders involved both legal and illegal trade. In pre-revolutionary France, for instance, the uneven imposition of tax on salt created a lucrative but illegal market for smuggling. Olwen Hufton has demonstrated how profits could be reaped by smuggling salt from low-tax to high-tax areas. It was difficult for the authorities to catch the smugglers because of their supreme knowledge of the territory and because of the support and complicity of the locals. Men, women and children all smuggled salt in this way, and it was a source of income that could be combined with ordinary work, for instance in fishing.68 Engagement in many different economic activities held the potential of transforming dependencies and interdependencies. Instead of only working with and for the rest of the household, under the authority of the head of household, working people could be in several different labour relations. For instance, young people could intersperse periods of service with periods of more casual labour living at home. Labour law usually prescribed that young 64

65 66 67

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Wrigley, ‘Urban growth’, 697. The phenomenon of occupational discrepancy, and the different terms used to designate such discrepancy, are discussed in detail in Shepard, Accounting for Oneself, 249, 255. Margaret R. Hunt, Women in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Routledge, 2009), 71; Zucca Micheletto, ‘Husbands, masculinity’, 757. See, e.g., Abreu-Ferreira, ‘Women and the acquisition’. Jonas Lindström and Jan Mispelaere, ‘Interdependent living: Labouring families and the Swedish mining industry in the late seventeenth century’, History of the Family 22:1 (2016), 136–55. Hufton, Poor, 287–305; Anne Montenach, ‘Legal trade and black markets: Food trades in Lyon in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries’, in Deborah Simonton and Anne Montenach (eds.), Female Agency in the Urban Economy: Gender in European Towns, 1640–1830 (London: Routledge, 2013), 17–33; Maria Ågren, ‘Emissaries, allies, accomplices and enemies: Married women’s work in eighteenth-century urban Sweden’, Urban History 41 (2014), 394–414.

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people be in service only, but in fact, they could also be employed on shorterterm contracts or work at their parents’ place.69 Adults too combined different sorts of income-generating work, as has been shown for instance in the section on letter-writing above, and it can be difficult to tell exactly what the main occupation consisted of, particularly as this could change over time. Within one day, several different types of tasks could be carried out, tasks a modern observer would have placed in different sectors of the economy and classified as involving different labour relations. Once again, this illustrates how misleading a division of the economy into clear-cut sectors often is. Men and women were also active as self-employed micro-entrepreneurs. Women from Swedish Helsingborg travelled across the strait to Danish Helsingör to sell meat, butter and other products, and women from Essex travelled to London to sell their produce.70 Many ‘ordinary’ (that is, not elite) women were active in credit markets where they could appear in different entrepreneurial roles. They were there as creditors, lending their capital to others, they were there as guarantors, providing surety (or caution, an early modern term) for others, and they were there as brokers and intermediaries, putting creditors into contact with prospective customers. Women were also engaged as appraisers of value, often of textiles. In sixteenth-century English, German and Dutch cities, male pawnbrokers used female go-betweens to assess the value of pawned clothes. In this capacity, the women facilitated the contact between borrower and lender, stimulating the credit market as a whole.71 Different roles in the credit market required different assets and skills. To be a creditor or a guarantor, one had to have access to capital, be able to count and have some understanding of investment and risk. To be a broker, one had to have a social network and detailed knowledge about the needs and trustworthiness of people in the neighbourhood. To be an appraiser of value, one had to have knowledge both about materials and craftsmanship. To be a debtor, finally, one had to be creditworthy, which in turn required a reputation as an industrious worker, a parsimonious householder and a person of honour. Evermarried women were evidently not barred from access to such resources, as 69

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Charmian Mansell, ‘Female service and the village community in South-West England 1550–1650: The labour laws reconsidered’ and Cristina Prytz, ‘Life-cycle servant and servant for life: work and prospects in rural Sweden c.1670–1730’, both in Jane Whittle (ed.), Servants in Rural Europe, 1400–1900 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2017), 77–94, 95–112. Solveig Fagerlund, Handel och vandel. Vardagslivets sociala struktur ur ett kvinnoperspektiv. Helsingborg ca 1680–1709 (Lund: Studia Historica Lundensia, 2002), 72–91; Amanda J. Flather, ‘Space, place, and gender: The sexual and spatial division of labor in the early modern household’, History and Theory 52:3 (2013), 344–60. Korda, Labors Lost, 45–46; Wiesner, Working Women, 144–46; Thera Wijsenbeek, ‘Van priseersters en prostituées. Beroepen van vrouwen in Delft en Den Haag tijdens de achttiende eeuw’, Jaarboek voor Vrouwengeschiedenis 8 (1987), 173–202.

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they appeared in all roles, although perhaps not to the same extent. In most places, for instance, daughters inherited less than their brothers and women earned less than men. This would have made it more difficult for women to accumulate capital and establish themselves as creditors but working capacity and economic prudence may have compensated for lack of property. The source of many resources – reputation, knowledge – was in social interaction. It is not obvious that this discriminated against women. As scholars of modern economies have noted, networks are well-suited for knowledge-intensive activities in which trust and long-term relationships are more important than immediate profit.72 The traditional view has been that women could not be active in knowledge-intensive activities in the past because they were barred from formal higher education. In fact, many of the activities that women typically engaged in – care work, teaching, trading activities, credit transactions, managerial activities – did require various forms of knowledge. Women must have required this knowledge in their everyday household activities but also in networks transcending household borders.73 The thesis that multiple sources of income were so important can be critiqued with the argument that it is impossible to do many things at the same time. Indeed, if spousal deputizing was so essential precisely because the husband could not do everything and be in many places at the same time, then this must mean that there was a limit to multiple employments. This is of course true. Many tasks could not be combined. It was not possible to plough a field and write a petition at the same time. On the other hand, quite a few tasks were combinable. One could prepare food while at the same time brokering a deal, and one could care for a sick person while at the same time appraising the value of an object. In a similar manner, one could sell vegetables while at the same time having a subordinate household member clean the floor. The different roles one could have in markets did not require fulltime commitment. Indeed, if other people’s trust was essential and if such trust was nurtured by one’s sustenance activities and social relations, being successfully involved in multiple activities in many contexts was probably an asset rather than an obstacle for both women and men. Involvement in many activities suggested wide-ranging capacity and may, therefore, have impressed others; it impresses us today so why should it not have impressed early modern people? Even if some early modern workers (such as women spinning for piece wages) no doubt shared conditions with nineteenth-century factory workers, it would be misleading to think of all early modern people as tied to one type of task and

72 73

Walter W. Powell, ‘Neither market nor hierarchy: Network forms of organization’, Research in Organizational Behavior 12 (1990), 295–336. See also Ogilvie, Bitter Living, 231, 295.

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controlled by time clocks and superiors during the whole day. The scope for flexibility and diversification was not infinite but it did exist widely. Conclusion In the early modern period, growing shares of Europe’s populations had little or no land. Many people were neither self-sufficient peasants nor fulltime wageworkers, but something in-between or just different. They could be engaged in the production of their own and others’ food, but they often did other things as well, as this chapter makes clear. Multiple sources of income were a central feature of society and did not characterize the poor only. Women’s and men’s work was flexible and brought them into contact with women and men from other households, other communities and even other countries. Contrary to modern assumptions about what a home is, early modern households were not private organizations but open to the outside world, precisely because of the ways in which people supported themselves, administered their economies, defended their rights and upheld their honour. Early modern households were places of work and work-related activities. Studies of economic growth across time have sometimes expressed doubts about the viability of economies where specialization was low and diversification high. Subdivision of land and fragmentation of holdings are described, for instance, as ‘the bane of peasant societies when population increased’.74 Of course, this can be the reality behind diversification, but it is not always the case. A study of the mountainous Abruzzo region in Italy showed that tax arrears were much lower here, where multiple sources of income and strong integration in market networks were the common pattern, compared with adjacent regions.75 A study of the Friuli region, also in Italy, showed that where multiple sources of income predominated, the population was not as hard hit by a subsistence crisis as adjacent populations were.76 At least by these standards, multiple sources of income do not automatically translate into poverty and backwardness.77 Economies based on multiple sources of income were sustainable and resilient and this was probably the reason for their predominance in early modern society. Moreover, patterns that historians have 74 75

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Wrigley, ‘Urban growth’, 715. Alessandra Bulgarelli Lukacs, ‘The equilibrium of the mountain economy in the Apennines: The regional case of Abruzzo in the kingdom of Naples’, in Aleksander Panjek, Jesper Larsson and Luca Mocarelli (eds.), Integrated Peasant Economy in a Comparative Perspective. Alps, Scandinavia and Beyond (Koper: University of Primorska Press, 2017), 161–90. Alessio Fornasin and Claudio Lorenzini, ‘Integrated peasant economy in Friuli (16th–18th centuries)’, in Aleksander Panjek, Jesper Larsson and Luca Mocarelli (eds.), Integrated Peasant Economy in a Comparative Perspective. Alps, Scandinavia and Beyond (Koper: University of Primorska Press, 2017), 95–116. Panjek, ‘Integrated peasant economy’, 23.

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labelled multiple employment, by-employment, serial employment, and pluriactivity were and are still probably more widely spread than fulltime specialized employment.78 Rather than an aberration, multiple sources of income should be seen as a longstanding norm and practice in human societies. By paying attention to networks of employment, social contacts, trade and ‘assistance’, historians have shown that individuals interacted across household borders, across social groups and across large geographic distances in early modern societies. The diversified nature of household economies made social contacts particularly important. Moreover, the need to support the household and protect its daily interests in the wider community and at state institutions (such as law courts) required that married women had a wider repertoire of work practices than often assumed, some of which presupposed access to authority, roles of responsibility and governing skills. This means that economic and legal agency was probably more dispersed in early modern society than has generally been acknowledged.79 Members of households were not unaffected by the will of the head of household, whether this was a man, a woman or a couple, but their contacts in surrounding communities must have affected their bargaining position within the household because contacts were vital to a household’s survival. There were differences, of course, ranging from the household head’s large but not unlimited power to act (through deputizing and delegation) to the very restricted agency of a person doing coerced work. But while very few people had completely unrestricted agency, very few had no agency at all. Therefore, the industrial revolution was not what brought ‘freedom’ to household members,80 just as modernity was not necessarily what brought agency to women. We do know something about how people in the past used their restricted agency, and this will in turn tell us something about what they thought they had reason to value in life.81 Being able to protect one’s honour and the 78

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Andreas Eckert, ‘Von der “freien Lohnarbeit” zum “informellen Sektor”? Alte und neue Fragen in der Geschichte der Arbeit’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 43 (2017), 297–307, especially 298, 302–3. On how historians can investigate agency, see, e.g., Harris, English Aristocratic Women, 28, 62; Hunt, Women, 5–8; Walter Johnson, ‘On agency’, Journal of Social History 37:1 (2003), 113–24; Lynn M. Thomas, ‘Historicising agency’, Gender and History 28:2 (2016), 324–39; Anne Montenach and Deborah Simonton, ‘Introduction. Gender, agency and economy: Shaping the eighteenth-century European town’, and Laurence Fontaine, ‘Makeshift, women and capability in preindustrial European towns’, both in Deborah Simonton and Anne Montenach (eds.), Female Agency in the Urban Economy: Gender in European Towns, 1640–1830 (London: Routledge, 2013), 1–14, 56–72. Cf. Ruggles, ‘Future of historical family demography’. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1999) suggests that development should be defined as increasing power to choose ‘what one has reason to value’ in life. See Feminist Economics 9:2 and 3 (2003) for an in-depth discussion of the implications of Sen’s approach.

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long-term interests of one’s children was something for which both Michael Gyldenstolpe and Jane Cross expressed appreciation. The Gyldenstolpe family relied on three chief means to achieve these objectives. A diversified economy allowed them to survive; networks of social contacts allowed them to extend and receive various forms of help and assistance; an organizational structure where two adults managed the large household provided stability and allowed them better to assert their interests and rights. By all these measures, Jane Cross was less well-equipped, not least because she was a single mother. Hers was a very small and not very resource-rich household. Through their daily practices, both households show what early modern economic life consisted of and what it was for: to survive and thrive as well as one could reasonably expect.

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Care Alexandra Shepard

Making Care Count Care is a resource that is fundamental to human survival and well-being. Care is also a service, performed within both the market economy and the unpaid economy. Care work encompasses the reproductive labour required to generate human resources, the services required to sustain a productive population and the provision of personal care for the young, the chronically ill, the frail and those with physical and mental disabilities. Care in these terms, both paid and unpaid, is at the core of every economy. Care comes at a cost and involves complex relationships of supply and demand linked to uneven provision and distribution. Economic historians, however, have devoted scant attention to the costs and benefits of care, even though it is comparable in significance to food or transport. Just because the need for care is ubiquitous does not mean that its character or its cost is unchanging, and just because the bulk of it is performed by women does not mean that it should be naturalized or treated as external to the economy. Care comprises part of ‘capitalism’s economic subsystem’, without which the market economy could not function, as well as a vital service within the paid economy.1 The demands and distribution of the work of care shape time allocation, labour relations, gender inequality and social inequality. Productive labour and reproductive labour are interdependent and we cannot fully count one without exploring the other or the relationship between them.2 This chapter makes a case for treating care as a variable in the assessment of early modern European economic performance by charting variability in its provision and its significance for the productive economy. The discussion

1

2

Nancy Fraser, ‘Contradictions of capital and care’, New Left Review 100 (2016), 99–117. See also Nancy Folbre, ‘Family work: A policy-relevant intellectual history’, in Raffaella Sarti, Anna Bellavitis and Manuela Martini (eds.), What Is Work? Gender at the Crossroads of Home, Family, and Business from the Early Modern Era to the Present, International Studies in Social History, 30 (New York: Berghahn, 2018), 89–113. Miriam Glucksmann, ‘Shifting boundaries and interconnections: Extending the “total social organisation of labour”’, Sociological Review 53:2 (2005), 19–36.

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draws on the work of feminist economists who have developed methods to measure the value of the unpaid care economy and who have explored the relationship of systems of care provision (paid and unpaid) with women’s labour force participation and with gender inequalities and social inequalities. Building on Marxist feminists’ recognition of reproductive labour as economically significant work – comprising the reproduction of human beings, maintenance of the workforce and social reproduction – feminist economists have recently reiterated the importance of what is variously termed the ‘reproductive economy’, the ‘invisible economy’, the ‘other economy’, the ‘second economy’ or the ‘core economy’.3 The ways in which societies meet the demands and distribution of care provision are linked both to economic dynamism and to gender inequality and social inequality. Current imperatives to recognize, reduce and redistribute the care burden build on claims about the wider economic and human benefits to be derived from the infrastructural support of care and the more equitable distribution of caring responsibilities.4 Notwithstanding its ongoing exclusion from the System of National Accounts, unpaid care work features as a massive component of satellite accounts, valued in relation to market equivalents estimated from the cost of commercial care services.5 In 2016, the value of unpaid household services in Britain was equivalent to 63 per cent of GDP, larger than the non-financial corporation sector.6

3

4

5

6

Shahra Razavi, ‘The political and social economy of care in a development context: Conceptual issues, research questions and policy options’, UN RISD, Gender and Development Programme Paper 3 (June, 2007); Kate Raeworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21stCentury Economist (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2017); Susan Donath, ‘The other economy: A suggestion for a distinctively feminist economics’, Feminist Economics 6 (2000), 115–23; Anna Coote and Neva Goodwin, ‘The great transition: Social justice and the core economy’, NEF Working Paper 1 (London, 2010). See also Nancy Folbre, ‘Measuring care: Gender, empowerment, and the care economy’, Journal of Human Development 7 (2006), 183–99. Valeria Esquivel, ‘What is a transformative approach to care, and why do we need it?’, Gender & Development 22 (2014), 423–39. See also the UN sustainable development goal 5.4: to ‘recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and the family as nationally appropriate’. Despite the relaxation of production boundaries in the System of National Accounts from 1993 to include the unpaid supply of goods and some housing services, the value of unpaid care services (including the preparation of meals, laundry, cleaning, shopping and the care of children, the elderly, the sick and the disabled within households) remained excluded. System of National Accounts (Brussels/Luxembourg, New York, Paris, Washington, DC, 1993). See also Susan Himmelweit, ‘The discovery of “unpaid work”: The social consequences of the expansion of “work”’, Feminist Economics, 1:2 (1995), 1–19; Cynthia A. Wood, ‘The first world/third party Criterion: A feminist critique of production boundaries in economics’, Feminist Economics, 3:3 (1997), 47–68. Office for National Statistics, ‘Household satellite account, UK: 2015 and 2016’ (2018).

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The unequal distribution of caring responsibilities often carries heavy social and economic costs. Performance of care work, whether unpaid or paid, is clearly linked to profound inequalities not only between the sexes but also between social groups and in association with racial discrimination. While the amount of time devoted to unpaid care work has varied over time and between places, women’s primary responsibility for care provision generally carries heavy ‘opportunity costs’ and is linked to time poverty, economic insecurity, exclusion from the public domain and even increased health risks.7 These costs are disproportionately borne by poorer women, who have fewer options to delegate their own caring responsibilities via market-sourced substitutes and who also supply the ranks of poorly paid carers whose cheap labour fulfils the care needs of more secure households, thereby compounding – and indeed widening – social inequality.8 The cost of unpaid care can, therefore, amount to much more than its market equivalent. This is not to deny that care can deliver benefits to the carer as well as the cared-for or to overlook the intrinsic value of care work’s potential to generate rich emotional rewards, but it is to emphasize the importance of attending to the labour relations structuring care provision and their implications for the providers as much as for the recipients of care as well as for the broader economy. In particular, the relationships between care provision and women’s labour force participation, and between the distribution of care work and inequalities dividing women – particularly on the basis of age, marital status, class and race – carry implications for labour productivity and in turn for growth as well as for well-being.9 Economic historians interested in early modernity and modernizing processes have paid scant attention to the structure, value and cost of care in their narratives of change. Standard measures of progress chart GDP, occupational structure, urbanization, institutions, levels of literacy and standards of living.10 In historical accounts of economic development, care is either ignored 7 8

9

10

Nancy Folbre, Who Pays for the Kids? Gender and the Structures of Constraint (London: Routledge, 1994). Himmelweit, ‘Discovery of “unpaid work”’; Arlie Russell Hochschild, ‘Global care chains and emotional surplus value’, in Will Hutton and Anthony Giddens (eds.), On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000), 130–46. Naila Kabeer, ‘Gender equality, economic growth, and women’s agency: The “endless variety” and “monotonous similarity” of patriarchal constraints’, Feminist Economics 22:1 (2016), 295–321. On the growing recognition of care as ‘a central dimension of sustainable development’ see Valeria Esquivel and Andrea Kaufman, Innovations in Care: New Concepts, New Actors, New Policies (Berlin: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2017). On care and inequalities, see Mignon Duffy, Making Care Count: A Century of Gender, Race, and Paid Care Work (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011). See, e.g., Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); R. C. Allen, ‘Progress and poverty in early modern Europe’, Economic History Review 56:3 (2003), 403–43.

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altogether (deemed external to the economy) or it is treated as an unchanging constant. For example, a recent study of British growth between medieval and modern times posits that women contributed only a 30 per cent share of the total days worked in the economy on account of their ‘child-rearing and household duties’.11 Although attempts to include women’s productive activities in estimates of growth are a welcome development, the assumption that caring work fell exclusively on women and the assertion that women’s contribution remained constant over the course of six centuries (notwithstanding dramatic shifts in dependency ratios, slavery and empire, industrialization, urbanization, and welfare provision) seems less plausible – not least in light of data from modern time – use surveys that suggest considerable variation in divisions of labour between productive and reproductive work, both paid and unpaid.12 And, as Jane Whittle has recently argued, in the context of preindustrial England, the extent to which women’s ‘household duties’ or ‘domestic’ work included productive as well as reproductive labour also demands proper investigation.13 The growing body of scholarship that has highlighted the significance of women’s productive capacities for early modern economic development also raises questions about the related distribution of reproductive labour and its change over time. Jan de Vries’ argument that the Industrial Revolution was preceded by an industrious revolution highlights the reallocation of women and children’s labour away from home production towards market-oriented exchange as the basis of change.14 The concepts of ‘girl power’ and ‘girlfriendliness’ as distinguishing features of Europe’s north west from the late medieval period also link the region’s economic development to demographic and institutional structures that were relatively demanding of women’s productive capacities.15 Although the extent to which Europe’s North Sea region 11

12

13 14 15

Stephen Broadberry, Bruce M. S. Campbell, Alexander Klein, Mark Overton and Bas van Leeuwen, British Economic Growth 1270–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 348. See, e.g., Debbie Budlender, ‘The statistical evidence on care and non-care work across six countries’, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, Gender and Development Programme Paper No. 4 (December 2008); Esquivel and Kaufman, Innovations in Care. Jane Whittle, ‘A critique of approaches to “domestic work”: Women, work and the preindustrial economy’, Past & Present 243 (2019), 35–70. Jan de Vries, ‘The industrial revolution and the industrious revolution’, Journal of Economic History 54 (1994), 249–70. Tine De Moor and Jan Luiten van Zanden, ‘Girl power: The European Marriage Pattern and labour markets in the North Sea region in the late medieval and early modern period’, Economic History Review 63:1 (2010), 1–33; Sarah G. Carmichael, Alexandra de Pleijt, Jan Luiten van Zanden and Tine De Moor, ‘Reply to Tracy Dennison and Sheilagh Ogilvie: The European Marriage Pattern and the Little Divergence’, CGEH Working Paper no. 70. For scepticism about the contribution of ‘girl power’ to economic growth in the North West, see Beatrice Zucca Micheletto, ‘Reconsidering the southern Europe model: Dowry, women’s work and marriage

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facilitated – and was distinguished by – women’s economic agency remains open to considerable debate, it is now incumbent upon historians to take seriously the possibility that women’s productive activity not only contributed to but functioned as a driver of economic development.16 In addition, recent empirical research that drills down into gendered timeuse has confirmed the significance of women’s productive labour (both paid and unpaid) to the early modern economy.17 It is particularly noteworthy that marriage – far from diminishing women’s productive activities – often appears to have enhanced them. As Maria Ågren et al. have concluded, the household economies of early modern Sweden rested on a ‘two-supporter’ model rather than a male ‘breadwinner’ norm.18 Detailed observation of gendered divisions of labour in south-west England in a study by Jane Whittle and Mark Hailwood reveals similar expectations. While women performed the majority of housework and care work, these tasks ‘did not dominate their work repertoires’; they were often carried out for non-family members; and married women were under-represented among those performing care work.19 Such findings conflict with common assumptions that married women’s productive labour contracted substantially on account of their child-rearing and household duties and beg the question of how care work was organized to facilitate married women’s productive work. All this is not to suggest that child-rearing and unpaid care work did not affect married women’s productivity, but it is to

16

17

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19

patterns in pre-industrial urban Italy (Turin, second half of the eighteenth century), History of the Family 16:4 (2011), 354–70; Tracy Dennison and Sheilagh Ogilvie, ‘Does the European Marriage Pattern explain economic growth?’, Journal of Economic History 74:3 (2014), 651–93; and Jane Humphries and Jacob Wiesdorf, ‘The wages of women in England, 1260–1850’, Journal of Economic History 75:2 (2015), 405–47. Jan Luiten van Zanden, Sarah Carmichael and Tine De Moor, Capital Women: The European Marriage Pattern, Female Empowerment and Economic Development in Western Europe 1300–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Sheilagh Ogilvie, A Bitter Living: Women, Markets, and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Maria Ågren (ed.), Making a Living, Making a Difference: Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Jane Whittle and Mark Hailwood, ‘The gender division of labour in early modern England’, Economic History Review 73:1 (2020), 3–32. Sofia Ling, Karin Hassan Jansson, Marie Lennersand, Christopher Pihl and Maria Ågren, ‘Marriage and work: Intertwined sources of agency and authority’, in Ågren (ed.), Making a Living, 80–102. See also Elizabeth S. Cohen, ‘Miscarriages of apothecary justice: Un-separate spaces of work and family in early modern Rome’, Renaissance Studies 21:4 (2007), 480–504; ‘Partners in business? Spousal cooperation in trades in early modern England and the Dutch Republic’, Special Issue of Continuity and Change, 23:2 (2008); ‘Households, family workshops and unpaid market work in Europe from the 16th century to the present’, Special Section of History of the Family, 19:3 (2014); Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), chs 5–7; Alexandra Shepard, ‘Minding their own business: Married women and credit in early eighteenth-century London’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 25 (2015), 53–74. Whittle and Hailwood, ‘Gender division of labour’, 20, 22.

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question the extent to which reproductive labour determined women’s other economic activities, not least when it is assumed to be unchanging over long stretches of time. As Jane Humphries and Carmen Sarasúa have argued, demand for women’s work has historically been a much more important variable in women’s labour force participation than its supply.20 In addition, any assumption that men were fully employed in productive work is highly doubtful, and it is becoming clear that men were also involved in unpaid care work (besides the provision of paid care services) both in and beyond early modern households.21 This chapter presents a case for counting care and accounting for it as a fundamental feature of the economy. It does so by demonstrating regional and historical variation in the care burden; variation in the tasks deemed necessary to meet the care needs of the early modern European population; variation in the material environments in which such tasks were performed; and variation in the distribution of those tasks within the ‘care diamond’ of familial, commercial, state-provided and voluntary services and between paid and unpaid contributions.22 It is suggested here that this variation mattered economically in ways which are likely to have affected economic performance whether measured in terms of growth or well-being. Assessing the extent of unpaid care work (both direct and indirect) is crucial if we are to establish the relative size of women’s and men’s productive contributions in assessments of labour productivity. The size and structure of paid care work in the early modern ‘care economy’ was also linked to opportunities for women’s productive work (for subsistence and for the market). While the relationship between family forms and welfare regimes has been closely observed in tests of Peter Laslett’s ‘nuclear hardship hypothesis’ (which suggests that neo-locality and nuclear family forms stimulated distinctive poor-relief provision in North-West Europe), the relationship between markets for care services, the availability of unpaid care and women’s work remains unscrutinized and might present a means of treating care as a variable in the analysis of economic change.23

20 21

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23

Jane Humphries and Carmen Sarasúa, ‘Off the record: Reconstructing women’s labor force participation in the European past’, Feminist Economics 18:4 (2012), 39–67. Jane Humphries and Carmen Sarasúa, ‘The feminization of the labor force and five associated myths’, in Günseli Berik and Ebru Kongar (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Economics (London: Routledge, 2021), 167–76; Beatrice Zucca Micheletto, ‘Husbands, masculinity, male work and household economy in eighteenth-century Italy: The case of Turin’, Gender & History 27:3 (2015), 752–72. Razavi, ‘Political and social economy of care’. See also Valeria Esquivel, ‘Care in households and communities: Background paper on conceptual issues’, Oxfam Research Reports, October 2013. Peter Laslett, ‘Family, kinship and collectivity as systems of support in pre-industrial Europe: A consideration of the “nuclear-hardship” hypothesis’, Continuity and Change 3:2 (1988), 153–75.

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Variation in the Care Burden Establishing the extent and the character of care provision over time and between places is not a simple task. There are various ways in which ‘care’ can be defined, let alone measured. There is, of course, a rich historical literature on caring relationships in early modern Europe.24 Much of the focus has been on caring about rather than caring for people and – perhaps as a result – the sentiments associated with parent–child and marital relations have been emphasized above the hands-on logistics of both direct and indirect care for a wide range of dependents.25 It is important to tease apart the labour of care from the manner of provision (done ‘with care’) and from attitudes of concern that are combined in the English term ‘care’.26 Some European languages specify such distinctions rather than deploying an umbrella term for ‘care’. In French, for example, ‘activités de soin d’autrui’ (caring for others) is differentiated from ‘souci des autres’ (concern for others).27 Similarly, in Swedish, ‘vårda’ and ‘sköta’ (verbs) mean to care practically, whereas ‘omsorg’ primarily refers to concern and solicitude for others. As Linda Oja has argued, historical explorations of care provision must not assume that a person expressing care about another is also the person physically caring for them.28 Nor should we always expect that the performance of care work stems from or inspires emotional attachment. Establishing the size and structure of the care burden – focusing on the tangible work of care – therefore provides a useful starting point, distinct from assumptions about who undertook it or the quality of its provision. Dependency ratios constitute one index of the proportion of the population requiring care in relation to those theoretically capable of providing it. 24

25 26 27 28

For a summary of the ‘sentiments approach’ to the history of the family, see Michael Anderson, Approaches to the History of the Western Family 1500–1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1980), ch. 3. For an overview of some of the central arguments, see, e.g., Michael Mitterauer and Reinhard Sieder, The European Family: Patriarchy to Partnership from the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. by Karla Oosterveen and Manfred Hörzinger (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982); Stephen Wilson, ‘The myth of motherhood a myth: The historical view of European child-rearing’, Social History 9:2 (1984), 181–98; Keith Wrightson, ‘The family in early modern England: Continuity and change’, in S. Taylor, R. Connors and C. Jones (eds.), Hanoverian Britain and Empire: Essays in Memory of Philip Lawson (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1998), 1–22; Colin Heywood, A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times (Cambridge: Polity, 2001). Linda Oja, ‘Childcare and gender in Sweden, c.1600–1800’, Gender & History 27:1 (2015), 77–111. Vinca Bigo and Mia Gray, ‘Constructing care: For love or money’, Revue de philosophie économique 10:1 (2009), 103–24. Clyde Plumauzille and Mathilde Rossigneux-Méheust, ‘Le care, une “voix différente” pour l’histoire du genre’, Clio. Femmes, Genre, Histoire 49 (2019), 7–22. Oja, ‘Childcare’.

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Conventionally understood in terms of financial reliance, dependency ratios can be reformulated as ‘care dependency ratios’ to reflect a population’s minimal care needs. One method might involve double weighting those under 7 and over 70 years of age in relation to those aged 7–14 and 60–69 and dividing the sum by the remaining potential care givers aged between 15 and 60.29 When details of age and household structure are available in census materials it is also possible to assess variation in household dependency ratios using the same measure. In direct contrast to today’s ageing population in the West, early modern European society was youth heavy. Almost half of Leiden’s population was aged below 15 in 1622; in late seventeenth century England, Gregory King estimated that the under 10s made up 28 per cent of the population – a figure that is matched by data from late seventeenth-century Bohemia.30 The greatest demands for care provision arose from the needs of young children. A fertile, married woman could expect to bear a child every two to three years, although birth intervals varied with economic conditions and lengthened towards the end of a woman’s childbearing life.31 Infants were typically breastfed for 18–24 months, which meant that, when maternal breastfeeding was undertaken, married women accommodated a steady set of reproductive demands during their childbearing years associated with pregnancy, birth, and nursing. Although wet-nursing spared many mothers the labour of nursing and infant care, it also removed the contraceptive effects of breastfeeding, reducing the intervals between pregnancies for non-lactating mothers. ‘Child–woman’ ratios, in terms of the numbers of children below the age of 5 in relation to the numbers of women between 15 and 49, were therefore relatively high.32 The length of women’s childbearing years was heavily dictated by their age at first marriage. This was a key differential in the European Marriage Pattern which was first hypothesized by John Hajnal and which has subsequently been linked to the relative economic success of the north west.33 The mean age at 29

30 31 32 33

This is an adaptation of the care dependency ratios outlined by Budlender by lowering the upper age limits in line with the dependency ratios deployed by historical demographers. Budlender, ‘Statistical evidence on care and non-care work’, 31–34. Henry Kamen, Early Modern European Society (London: Taylor & Francis, 2000), 18–19. Francesco Cinnirella, Marc Klemp and Jacob Weisdorf, ‘Malthus in the bedroom: Birth spacing as birth control in pre-transition England’, Demography 54 (2017), 413–36. J. Dennis Willigan and Katherine A. Lynch, Sources and Methods of Historical Demography (New York: Academic Press, 1982). John Hajnal, ‘European marriage patterns in perspective’, in David V. Glass and David E. C. Eversley (eds.), Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography (London: Edward Arnold, 1965), 101–43; Peter Laslett, ‘Family and household as work group and kin group: Areas of traditional Europe compared’, in Richard Wall, Jean Robin and Peter Laslett (eds.), Family Forms in Historic Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 513–63. See also David Sven Reher, ‘Family ties in Western Europe: Persistent contrasts’, Population and Development Review 24:2 (1998), 203–34.

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first marriage for women in Denmark, Sweden, England and Amsterdam in the seventeenth century was between 26 and 27. By contrast, data from Cuenca and Felanitx (Spain) and Altopascio (Tuscany) establish a mean age at marriage of 19–21.34 Relatively high celibacy rates (compared with near universal marriage in southern Europe) were another feature of marriage patterns in the north west, where a significant proportion of women bore no children at all and the onset of reproductive labour was relatively delayed for the women who did embark on a childbearing career. Households were comparatively small and depended heavily on the labour of live-in servants. Smaller households were also common in Eastern Europe, whereas in southern Europe joint or extended households were more prevalent, although very far from a universal norm.35 It has become clear that the European Marriage Pattern, as originally hypothesized by Hajnal, is over-schematic and under-estimates the huge variability in household formation, size and structure across early modern Europe.36 However, variation in age at first marriage and the proportions never marrying had a significant overall impact on the incidence of care needs and the distribution of caring responsibilities.37 Although not exclusive to the North West, a nuclear family structure that accommodated life-cycle servants was linked to conventions that marriage coincided with the establishment of a new household, limiting the available supply of in-house familial childcare by extended kin.38 Later marriage and nuclear households were associated with lower dependency ratios and childcare regimes that relied on a variety of extrafamilial sources, many of which were designed to facilitate the productive capacities of married women on which household economies depended.

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Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘Singlewomen in medieval and early modern Europe: The demographic perspective’, in Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (eds.), Singlewomen in the European past 1250–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 38–81. Mikołaj Szołtysek, ‘Households and family systems’, in Hamish Scott (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350–1750, vol. 1: Peoples and Places (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 313–41. Pierre Goubert, ‘Family and province: A contribution to the knowledge of family structures in early modern France’, Journal of Family History 2:3 (1977), 179–95; Pier Paolo Viazzo, ‘What’s so special about the Mediterranean? Thirty years of research on household and family in Italy’, Continuity and Change 18:1 (2003), 111–37; Pier Paolo Viazzo, ‘South of the Hajnal line: Italy and Southern Europe’, in Theo Engelen and Arthur P. Wolf (eds.), Marriage and the Family in Eurasia: Perspectives on the Hajnal Hypothesis (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2005), 129–64. These factors were also significant in shaping the intensity of patriarchal relations. See Mikołaj Szołtysek, Sebastian Klüsener, Radosław Poniat and Siefgrid Gruber, ‘The patriarchy index: A new measure of gender and generational inequalities in the past’, Cross-Cultural Research 51:3 (2017), 228–62. Raffaella Sarti, ‘Rural life-cycle service: Established interpretations and new (surprising) data – the Italian case in comparative perspective (sixteenth to twentieth centuries)’, in Jane Whittle (ed.), Servants in Rural Europe 1400–1900 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2018), 227–54.

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There were also many care recipients among the adult population – not least the sick and disabled. Illness was a common preoccupation in early modern Europe, both in terms of its treatment and prevention. The vast bulk of early modern healthcare was provided in domestic settings on an unpaid basis, involving personal care and the preparation and administration of remedies.39 It is difficult to quantify the extent of illness and impairment and their associated care requirements, but the repeated waves of epidemic disease, as well as the injury resulting from the endemic warfare of the long seventeenth century, at home and in European colonies, must have added substantially to the more routine demands of childcare and elder care.40 In theatres of war, the numbers of soldiers succumbing to injury and disease – and therefore requiring at least some rudimentary care (often provided by camp followers) – far outstripped the numbers who died in battle.41 Longer term physical impairment was also commonplace, frequently linked to poverty as well as to the ravages of war and disease. Workplace accidents were another cause of shortterm injury as well as life-long disability.42 Finally, mental illness generated additional care needs, notwithstanding the very different approaches to treatment associated with the ‘pre-modern’ period.43 End-of-life care should also be factored in to estimates of the care burden, as well as tending to corpses in preparation for burial. In cases of a ‘good death’, care involved keeping vigil over the dying and providing spiritual as well as physical comfort.44 While idealized depictions of dying well emphasized a clear spiritual rite of passage, the physical reality was all too often more 39

40 41 42

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Mary Fissell, ‘Women in healing spaces’, in Laura Lunger Knoppers (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 153–64; Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey (eds.), Conserving Health in Early Modern Culture: Bodies and Environments in Italy and England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). Michael Stolberg, Experiencing Illness and the Sick Body in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). See also Chapter 7. Frank Tallett, War and Society in Early Modern Europe: 1495–1715 (London: Routledge, 1997), 105–12. Robert Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 24–25; David Turner, Disability in Eighteenth-Century England: Imagining Physical Impairment (London: Routledge, 2012); Craig Spence, Accidents and Violent Death in Early Modern London, 1650–1750 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2016); Chris Gabbard and Susanna B. Mintz (eds.), A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Eighteenth Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. by Richard Howard (London: Tavistock, 1971); Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Patrick McDonagh, C. F. Goodey and Timothy Stainton (eds.), Intellectual Disability: A Cultural History 1200–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). Lucinda McCray Beier, ‘The good death in seventeenth-century England’, in Ralph Houlbrooke (ed.), Death, Ritual, and Bereavement (London: Taylor Francis, 1989), 43–61; Mia Korpiola

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traumatic, not just because of the risk of sudden death emphasized by the ars moriendi, but also because of the limited means of alleviating pain. Common killers such as cancer, consumption, dysentery, typhus and the plague could involve excruciating suffering over periods of weeks and months. The burden of care in such situations should not be underestimated. Michael Stolberg suggests that it is ‘almost impossible to imagine what it meant to accompany a sick person as they approached death, with pain and cramps that could hardly be controlled with the existing medication, who screamed almost uninterruptedly day and night, writhing with cramps, or whose body literally appeared to be dissolving into foul, sanious excretions.’45 Child illness was a regular focus of such ministrations.46 Roughly one quarter of babies died before reaching the age of one, with an equal proportion succumbing before reaching their fifth birthday. Infant mortality rates ranged from 154 per 1,000 births in Germany to 281 in Spain and 283 in Switzerland before 1750, with additional variation between regions and occupational groups.47 While historians of the family have treated high levels of infant mortality as both the cause and effect of parental neglect, there is no doubt that infant morbidity and mortality added significantly to the labour-intensity of childcare.48 The tasks associated with attending to an infant suffering from pain, fever, vomiting, or diarrhoea – caused by anything from teething to malnutrition to fatal disease – were not minor, nor easily managed, requiring substantial ‘body work’ as well as the indirect care associated with laundry and the preparation of remedies.49 The emotional as well as physical toll of care in such unremitting circumstances could be very great, producing a range of

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and Anu Lahtinen (eds.), Cultures of Death and Dying in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Helsinki: University of Helsinki, 2015). Michael Stolberg, A History of Palliative Care, 1500–1970: Concepts, Practices and Ethical Challenges (Cham: Springer, 2017), 74. Lewis Germain and Ian Sabroe, ‘The care of dying people in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England’, Death Studies 44:5 (2020), 270–77. Hannah Newton, The Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580–1720 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Michael W. Flinn, The European Demographic System, 1500–1820 (Brighton: Harvester, 1981), 16–17. See also David Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli (eds.), The History of the European Family, vol. I: Family Life in Early Modern Times, 1500–1789 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). See, e.g., Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality, trans. Richard Southern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), ch. 3; Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1977); Mitterauer and Sieder, European Family. Mary E. Fissell, ‘Introduction: Women, health, and healing in early modern Europe’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82 (2008), 1–17. On the causes of infant death, see Arnold Radtke, ‘Rethinking the medical causes of infant death in early modern Europe: A closer look at church registers and medical terminology’, History of the Family 7:4 (2002), 505–14.

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responses in carers from murderous rage to severe illness. While we know most about infancy, child mortality remained high up to the age of 15.50 Nor should the daily grind of indirect care for the able-bodied population be taken for granted or written out of our estimates of the work of care in the past. Food preparation, family care and housework – much of it unpaid, yet timeconsuming and involving skill – was as essential to the early modern economy as agriculture or transport. Jane Whittle’s recent suggestion that unpaid housework and care work should be approached as ‘subsistence services’ (akin to subsistence production, and thus foundational) highlights a conceptual framework for including such essential services as part of our economic analysis, rather than anachronistically writing them off as ‘domestic’ and therefore somehow separate from the economy.51 The value of such activities becomes quantifiable when factored in to the services provided in the form of board and lodging for employees and also for the myriad migrants (both short and longterm) who sojourned in boarding houses, inns and other lodgings in early modern towns and cities.52 To activities such as laundry, housework, meal preparation and fuel and water collection, we might also add animal maintenance, a vital component of early modern subsistence, industry and commerce. It is perhaps safe to generalize that high-pressure demographic regimes (with mortality as the main driver) generated greater caring demands than low-pressure systems (governed more by brakes on fertility), constituting another difference shaping the care burden between regions. There were also many other variables at work, however, including the material environment and the structure of local economies. The collection of fuel and water, for instance, entailed varying efforts depending on their location and type of available sources. Cultural conventions dictating approaches to care also

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Carolyn Steedman, ‘A boiling copper and some arsenic: Servants, childcare, and class consciousness in late eighteenth-century England’, Critical Inquiry 34:1 (2007), 36–77; Stolberg, History of Palliative Care, 74–75. See also Susan Broomhill, ‘Beholding suffering and providing care: Emotional performances on the death of poor children in sixteenth-century French institutions’, in Katie Barclay, Kimberley Reynolds and Ciara Rawnsley (eds.), Death, Emotion and Childhood in Premodern Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 65–86. For current observations on the adverse effects of care provision on carers’ mental and physical health, see Melanie Henwood, Mary Larkin and Alisoun Milne, ‘Seeing the wood for the trees. Carerrelated research and knowledge: A scoping review’, report for Social Care Institute for Excellence (2017), 68–72. Whittle, ‘Critique of approaches to “domestic work”’. For pioneering work designed to assess the relative value of women’s unpaid domestic labour to household income, see Jane Humphries, ‘From the wings to centre stage: Women and economic growth’, Keynote Lecture, World Economic History Congress, Boston 2018, http://wehc2018 .org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Humphries_From_the_Wings_to_Centre_Stage.pdf (last accessed 9 January 2023) On lodging houses, see, e.g., Rosa Salzberg, ‘Mobility, cohabitation and cultural exchange in the lodging houses of early modern Venice’, Urban History 46:3 (2019), 398–418.

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varied between places, social groups and over time.53 If we take infant care as an example, the common custom of swaddling – believed to protect delicate limbs and used to keep a baby out of harm’s way – was a time-consuming exercise requiring skill, and access to a supply of fresh, dry, and possibly pressed, swaddling bands.54 Over the course of the early modern period, views about the benefits and risks of swaddling shifted, alongside questions surrounding other aspects of baby care such as co-sleeping, maternal breastfeeding, weaning and feeding on demand, informing class distinctions and the reworking of concepts of motherhood.55 The conventions of care-provision were far from static, therefore, just as the relative size and structure of the care burden varied between places and over time. All this demonstrates that it is highly unlikely that the work of care has ever been constant (or even constantly predictable). At the very least, that would be an extraordinary finding, and one that would need firm empirical backing to be credible. The character of care work changed according to the size and structure of the population requiring care, their care needs, the conventions governing forms of care, the material environments in which care took place, and the resources available to carers and those cared for. It is far too simplistic to assume that care in the early modern past was relatively straightforward because of its common colocation with productive activity in the household, or because of lower standards of care, or because of relative indifference to human needs and suffering. Not least, it is very problematic to assume that care formed the constant core around which women’s productive contributions were peripherally placed. Care regimes were structured in tandem with productive labour and could sometimes be designed specifically to enable women’s productive work. It is also clear that brutal necessity prioritized women’s productive labour above the care needs of dependents. In the fishing village of Koivulathi in eighteenth-century Finland, for example, infant mortality rates reached 548 per 1,000 births, owing to early weaning practices by mothers responsible for farming in their husbands’ absence.56 Care was 53

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On varying approaches to childcare over time and between classes, see, e.g., Bogna W. Lorence, ‘Parents and children in eighteenth-century Europe’, History of Childhood Quarterly 2 (1974), 1–30; Heywood, History of Childhood, ch. 5; Patricia Crawford, Parents of Poor Children in England, 1580–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Patricia Crawford, ‘“The sucking child”: Adult attitudes to child care in the first year of life in seventeenth-century England’, Continuity and Change 1:1 (1986), 23–51. Marsha Urban, Seventeenth-Century Mother’s Advice Books (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Alexandra Shepard, ‘The pleasures and pains of breastfeeding in England c.1600–c.1800’, in Michael J. Braddick and Joanna Innes (eds.), Suffering and Happiness in England 1550–1850: Narratives and Representations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 227–46. Cissie Fairchilds, Women in Early Modern Europe 1500–1700 (Harlow: Longman, 2007), 93. See also Ogilvie, Bitter Living, 194–200; Gill Newton, ‘Infant mortality variations, feeding practices and social status in London between 1550 and 1750’, Social History of Medicine 24:2 (2011), 260–80.

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configured in complex ways with considerable variation, and the productive work of ‘ever married’ women was not entirely or even predominantly dictated by their reproductive labour which could be compromised as a result or successfully delegated to others. It is to these patterns of delegation and the broader distribution of care work that we now turn. Variation in the Distribution of Care Work Care work was broadly distributed across a range of structures in configurations which also varied between places and over time. There were multiple sources of care provision in early modern Europe that extended far beyond unpaid familial contributions, owing both to necessity and design. Care, as with the mixed economy of welfare, was distributed across a ‘care diamond’ comprising four points of family, voluntary sector, state provision and the market.57 Situating these varied sources of care provision in relation to each other reduces the risk of generalizing from one and allows historians to assess the choices and constraints that shaped access to care. Examining the distribution of care work also provides a foundation for thinking about the labour relations of care provision and its value as work. To illustrate these points, this section will focus particularly on childcare – the lion’s share of the early modern care burden and a component that has been relatively well researched. Unpaid familial care work was undoubtedly a very significant part of the early modern care mix, as it remains today. In contemporary European economies, the volume of unpaid caring work far outstrips the allocation of paid care.58 Time-use surveys from around the contemporary world show that, when ascribed a monetary value, unpaid care can represent anything from 3 per cent to 63 per cent of GDP.59 Early modern care work was certainly more labour intensive than in present day settings. However, the organization of care within the early modern familial domain could be more extensive, dispersed between a range of people rather than committed to the sole responsibility of

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David R. Green and Alastair Owens, ‘Introduction: Family welfare and the welfare family’, in David R. Green and Alastair Owens (eds.), Family Welfare: Gender, Property and Inheritance since the Seventeenth Century (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 1–30. On the care diamond, see Razavi, ‘Political and social economy of care’. In the Swiss Canton of Basel-City, for example, the monetary value of unpaid care work exceeds the combined personnel costs of hospitals, crèches and schools. Razavi, ‘Political and social economy of care’, 12. Budlender, ‘Statistical evidence on care and non-care work’, 28. See also Rania Antonopoulos, ‘The unpaid care work–paid work connection’, Working Paper no. 86 (Geneva: International Labour Office, 2009); Nancy Folbre, ‘Valuing non-market work’, UNDP Human Development Report Office (2015).

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individual carers.60 Particularly in larger households, unpaid ‘familial’ care for children, for example, could be provided by mothers, fathers, step-parents, siblings, grandparents, servants, or lodgers – although when parents were present it was usually the mother who had supervisory responsibility. In poorer households, with fewer members and greater wage dependency, children were more at risk of being left unattended as parents had limited options to delegate care when their work took them beyond the household.61 When productive work was centred in and around the household, care work could be accommodated as a secondary activity. This did not necessarily make either productive or reproductive work efficient or easy, particularly if we bear in mind the extent of child illness and mortality. It seems unlikely that the idealized image of the ‘good housewife’, seated with a distaff or at a spinning wheel and flanked by improbably docile or studious children, was routinely attained in practice.62 However, given the economic importance of married women’s productive endeavours, mothers clearly did find ways of combining making a living with reproductive work, sometimes refocusing the former to enable the latter if possible and/or necessary. Married women selling tea and coffee in eighteenth-century Leiden, for example, tended to take up the trade after the birth of their first child in order to maximize household income in a way that could accommodate as well as support their expanding families.63 This kind of urban retail could be managed from home on a part time basis and could be a lucrative independent business for married women where markets existed.64 In some cases, married women’s productive work beyond the household remained apparently unimpeded by child-bearing. Married women’s work was often too valuable to be diverted by caring responsibilities, either because households could not survive without it or because it was sufficiently lucrative to justify the delegation of care. Women’s entry into the early modern Amsterdam eel market, for example, was relatively unaffected by marriage and having children. Eel sellers with young children did not withdraw from the labour market. Of the vendors who were mothers, 63 per cent had four or more 60 61 62

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Laura T. Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750 (New York: Knopf, 1982). Oja, ‘Childcare’. Mary Thomas Crane, ‘“Players in your huswifery, and huswives in your beds”: Conflicting identities of early modern English women’, in Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh (eds.), Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period (London: Routledge, 2000), 212–23. Danielle van den Heuvel and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, ‘Households, work and consumer changes: The case of tea and coffee sellers in 18th-century Leiden’, MEMS Working Papers 2 (2014). On women in retail, see Merry Wiesner, ‘Paltry peddlers or essential merchants? Women in the distributive trades in early modern Nuremberg’, Sixteenth Century Journal 12:2 (1981), 3–13.

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children. Some of these market women only leased a stall after having given birth to their youngest child, and possibly relied on older siblings for childcare at that point. The majority, however, gave birth while they were stall holders.65 While many such women may have turned to commercially sourced care, Danielle van den Heuvel also speculates that ‘the dense kinship networks in the eel market . . . [and] the presence of kin at the market allowed them to continue their business activities during their reproductive years’.66 In relation to childcare, ‘familial’ care provision therefore often extended well beyond birth parents. This was not only because of extended kinship ties and the congruence between ‘family’ and the household, but also because of relatively high rates of parental mortality.67 With the addition of temporary or permanent paternal abandonment (with rates of up to 10 per cent) ‘broken’ families and ‘blended’ families were commonplace, even a norm.68 The proportions of children who had lost at least one parent in English settlements could amount to over one third, and census records from early modern Castille show that almost 40 per cent of children below the age of 19 had lost at least one parent.69 As a consequence of parental loss and the frequency of remarriage, stepparenting was widespread in the early modern period. Men were more likely to remarry than women and with greater speed after the loss of a spouse – a habit that only highlights the material contribution of women’s care to household survival. In Wildberg (Germany), for example, between 1558 and 1807, 19 per cent of brides were widowed at marriage and 34 per cent of grooms. In France between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries between one fifth and one third of all marriages involved a remarriage, again with higher rates for men than women.70 In some cases, the death of the remaining parent left children in the 65

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Danielle van den Heuvel, Women and Entrepreneurship: Female Traders in the Northern Netherlands, c.1580–1815 (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2007), 127–37. See also Amy Louise Erickson, ‘Esther Sleepe, fan-maker, and her family’, Eighteenth-Century Life 42:2 (2018), 15–37. Danielle van den Heuvel, ‘The multiple identities of early modern Dutch fishwives’, Signs 37:3 (2012), 587–94, especially 591. Naomi Tadmor, ‘The concept of the household-family in eighteenth-century England’, Past & Present 151 (1996), 111–40. Manon van der Heijden, Ariadne Schmidt and Richard Wall, ‘Broken families: Economic resources and social networks of women who head families’, History of the Family 12:4 (2007), 223–32; Sylvie Perrier, ‘The blended family in ancien régime France: A dynamic family form’, History of the Family 3:4 (1998), 459–71. Peter Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations: Essays in Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 168; David E. Vassberg, ‘Orphans and adoption in early modern Castilian villages’, History of the Family 3:4 (1998), 441–58. Ogilvie, Bitter Living, 174; Lyndan Warner, ‘Widows, widowers and the problem of “second marriages” in sixteenth-century France’, in Sandra Cavallo and Lyndan Warner (eds.), Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Harlow: Longman, 1999), 84–107,

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sole care of a step-parent or a remarried step-parent. In the English settlements studied by Peter Laslett, for example, 11 per cent of orphaned children either lived with step-parents in the absence of a surviving parent or with persons other than parents or step-parents.71 Owing to men’s greater propensity to remarry after the death of a spouse, as well as women’s primary responsibility for childcare, step-mothers took on a far greater tranche of direct childcare than step-fathers. Although the figure of the wicked stepmother was a common trope in folklore and cautionary tales, there is little evidence that children fared any worse under their care, not least because step-mothers were as reliant as mothers on delegated childcare.72 Extended family frequently took on orphaned children, which sometimes entailed their separation from siblings, step-siblings, and half-siblings, as well as from step-parents. When, for example, the French merchant Claude Thibault died in 1764, the three children he had brought to his second marriage were each sent to be cared for in different households – one (aged 8) to his paternal grandfather, another (aged 4) to her paternal aunt, and the youngest (aged 2) to the three children’s guardian and paternal uncle. Their younger half-sibling from their father’s second marriage remained with their step-mother.73 In other cases, extended family took on children even when one or both parents remained alive. Additionally, in cases of illegitimacy, grandparents and wider kin (when available and willing) could be called on for childcare, particularly

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86–87. See also Barbara J. Todd, ‘The remarrying widow: A stereotype reconsidered’, in Mary Prior (ed.), Women in English Society 1500–1800 (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 54–83; Vivien Brodsky, ‘Widows in late Elizabethan London: Remarriage, economic opportunity and family orientations’, in Lloyd Bonfield, R. M. Smith and Keith Wrightson (eds.), The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 122–54; Jeremy Boulton, ‘London widowhood revisited: The decline of female remarriage in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries’, Continuity and Change 5:3 (1990), 323–55; Barbara Diefendorf, ‘Widowhood and remarriage in sixteenth-century Paris’, Journal of Family History 7 (1982), 379–95; Beatrice Moring and Richard Wall, Widows in European Economy and Society 1600–1920 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2017); Richard Wall, ‘European family and household systems’, in Historiens et populations: liber amicorum Étienne Hélin (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1991), 617–36; Renzo Derosas and Michel Oris (eds.), When Dad Died: Individuals and Families Coping with Family Stress in Past Societies (Berne: Peter Lang, 2002); Lyndan Warner (ed.), Stepfamilies in Europe, 1400–1800 (London: Routledge, 2018); Rebecca Mason, ‘Women, marital status, and law: The marital spectrum in seventeenth-century Glasgow’, Journal of British Studies 58:4 (2019), 787–804; Emma Griffin, ‘The value of motherhood: Understanding maternal absence in Victorian Britain’, Past & Present 246 (2020), 167–85. Laslett, Family Life, 166. Kai P. Willführ and Alain Gagnon, ‘Are stepmothers evil or simply unskilled? Infant death clustering in recomposed families’, Biodemography and Social Biology 58:2 (2012), 149–61. Perrier, ‘Blended family’, 469. See also Sylvie Perrier, ‘Coresidence of siblings, half-siblings, and step-siblings in Ancien régime France’, History of the Family 5:3 (2000), 299–314.

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in the north west of Europe, not least in order to enable the children’s parents to undertake productive work.74 Men were by no means absent from these networks, although evidence of them performing direct hands-on care is limited. Certainly, they were active and accountable for taking responsibility for the management and provision of care.75 Across Europe, childcare was normatively represented as women’s work, and images of men rocking the baby mocked a husband’s loss of control over his wife. This did not always fit the circumstances. We know that men took on childcare duties in the temporary absence of women. They can be glimpsed performing care work in studies of early modern time use, ranging from looking after the sick, the old, the young, the drunk and disorderly and animals.76 The Gender and Work database yields a few cases that show young men/boys caring for small children. These cases only appear in court records because of the injury or death of the child, such as when a small child fell into a kettle of boiling water and the young man who should have watched over the child was held responsible.77 The familial care of children, therefore, was often fluid, varying according to supply and demand on a day-to-day basis in relation to family and household structure, the demands of productive work and the proximity of kin, as well as shifting with the reconfiguration of households over the course of childhood in conjunction with parental migration, death and remarriage. Networks of care also extended beyond familial links to draw on a range of voluntary support, formal and informal.78 Such arrangements varied from the Celtic custom of fosterage that served elite strategies of affiliation and allegiance, to occasional neighbourly oversight of children in the case of an

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Sanne Muurling, Jeannette Kamp and Ariadne Schmidt, ‘Unwed mothers, urban institutions and female agency in early modern Dutch, German and Italian towns’, History of the Family 26:1 (2021), 11–28; David Postles, ‘Surviving lone motherhood in early-modern England’, The Seventeenth Century 21:1 (2006), 160–83; Alexandra Shepard, ‘Brokering fatherhood: Illegitimacy and paternal rights and responsibilities in early modern England’, in Steve Hindle, Alexandra Shepard and John Walter (eds.), Remaking English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2013), 41–63; Katie Barclay, ‘Illegitimacy’, in Anna French (ed.), Early Modern Childhood: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2019), 217–34; Katie Barclay, ‘Love, care and the illegitimate child in eighteenth-century Scotland’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 29 (2019), 105–25. Ågren (ed.), Making a Living, ch. 5; Oja, ‘Childcare’. Ågren (ed.), Making a Living; Whittle and Hailwood, ‘Gender division of labour’. On husbandry as a form of care, see Julie A. Nelson, ‘Husbandry: A (feminist) reclamation of masculine responsibility for care’, Cambridge Journal of Economics 40:1 (2016), 1–15. GaW Database, Uppsala University, search date 21 March 2021, case no. 762 (original source: Diocese of Västerås, Consistory court of Västerås, AI, 7). I owe this reference to Maria Ågren. Illana Krausman Ben-Amos, The Culture of Giving: Informal Support and Gift-Exchange in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

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emergency.79 The widespread practice of sending children and adolescents into service and apprenticeships built on existing networks of kinship, patronage, and friendship, functioning as a form of ‘pro-parenthood’ and normalizing the circulation of children between early modern households.80 In Western Europe about 40 per cent of all youths spent time as servants relocated from their households of origin in their teenage years if not before.81 This process was regulated by legal custom and contractual arrangements which, besides making arrangements for training, obliged the provision of care for servants and apprentices (in terms of spiritual direction, bed, board and laundry services) in return for their labour. Servants, in turn, could be entrusted with the formal and informal care and education of younger children in their employers’ households, introducing a further circulatory dimension to the domestic care arrangements for young people.82 A Swedish servant boy, for example, was charged with an infant’s death (by smothering) having fallen asleep when he should have been ‘rocking the baby’. The mother of the baby, who was also the mistress of the servant, acknowledged her responsibility for what had happened and pointed out that the servant – also a child – had been tired and had not hurt the baby intentionally.83 Institutional care provision was also a central and expanding component of the early modern care mix, ranging from the voluntary provision of the church to state-sanctioned outdoor poor relief initiatives designed to provide care for orphaned, illegitimate and/or abandoned children for whom no other support could be extracted. Legal systems, moral frameworks and welfare structures governing the treatment of ‘unwanted’ children varied both between and within regions across Europe.84 Different welfare structures shaped the focus 79

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Peter Parkes, ‘Celtic fosterage: Adoptive kinship and clientage in northwest Europe’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 48:2 (2006), 359–95; Llinos Beverley Smith, ‘Fosterage, adoption and God-parenthood: Ritual and fictive kinship in medieval Wales’, Welsh History Review 16:1 (1992), 1–35; Janay Nugent, ‘“Your louing childe and foster”: The fostering of Archie Campbell of Argyll, 1633–39’, in Janay Nugent and Elizabeth Ewan (eds.), Children and Youth in Premodern Scotland (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2015), 47–64. Isabel dos Guimarães Sá, ‘Circulation of children in eighteenth-century Portugal’, in Catherine Panter-Brick and Malcolm T. Smith (eds.), Abandoned Children (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 27–40. Linda A. Pollock, ‘Parent–child relations’, in David Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli (eds.), The History of the European Family, vol. I: Family Life in Early Modern Times, 1500–1789 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 191–220, 207. Raffaella Sarti, ‘Dangerous liaisons: Servants as “children” taught by their masters and as “teachers” of their masters’ children (Italy and France, sixteenth to twenty-first centuries)’, Paedagogica Historica 43 (2007), 565–87. GaW Database, Uppsala University, search date 21 March 2021, case no. 9915 (original source: Uppsala regional archives, Snevringe härad court, AI a, 5). I owe this reference to Maria Ågren. Joel F. Harrington, The Unwanted Child: The Fate of Foundlings, Orphans and Juvenile Criminals in Early Modern Germany (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009).

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and locus of care. There was a stark contrast between the proliferation of large, centralized charitable institutions in the Catholic cities of southern Europe and the consolidation of localized parochial responses in the Protestant north west (although confessional difference was only one of myriad factors shaping welfare regimes).85 More than 55,000 infants were cared for by La Inclusa in Madrid between 1586 and 1700, and almost 10,000 children were taken in by the Casa Cuna in Seville between 1618 and 1659.86 The foundling homes in Italian cities, which also took in thousands of abandoned infants each year, were intended to restore the honour of mothers (and fathers) of illegitimate children by removing the object of shame into custody. The turntable installed at Florence’s Ospedale degli Innocenti was designed specifically to protect the anonymity of anyone committing an infant to its care.87 By contrast, mothers of illegitimate children in English parishes might be paid to breastfeed their infants in arrangements deemed more cost-effective than putting illegitimate babies out to nurse, after which the children concerned could become the direct responsibility of the father.88 Orphaned, rather than illegitimate, children were the principal recipients of institutional care in early modern Holland and the German-speaking territories, where, in contrast to Italy, the abandonment of illegitimate infants was heavily discouraged. Some of these orphanages established selective entry criteria, limiting their services to burgher orphans whose parents held long-term citizenship rights. From the seventeenth century, other children’s homes were established in Dutch cities alongside burgher orphanages to cater for a wider range of children, but the number of illegitimate children receiving such institutional care remained limited.89 While eligibility criteria varied across 85

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Brian Pullan, Orphans and Foundlings in Early Modern Europe (Berkshire: University of Reading, 1989). See also Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State, to 1620 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971); Brian Pullan, Poverty and Charity: Europe, Italy, Venice, 1400–1700 (Aldershot: Variorum Collected Studies, 1994). Lola Valverde, ‘Illegitimacy and the abandonment of children in the Basque Country, 1550–1800’, in John Henderson and Richard Wall (eds.), Poor Women and Children in the European Past (London: Routledge, 1994), 51–64, 53. Sandra Cavallo and S. Cerutti, ‘Female honor and social control of reproduction in Piedmont between 1600 and 1800’, in Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (eds.), Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 73–109; Nicholas Terpstra, Abandoned Children of the Italian Renaissance: Orphan Care in Florence and Bologna (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Brian Pullan, Toleration, Regulation and Rescue: Dishonoured Women and Abandoned Children in Italy, 1300–1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). See also Julie Hardwick, Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France 1660–1789 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Shepard, ‘Brokering fatherhood’. Muurling, Kamp and Schmidt, ‘Unwed mothers’; Griet Vermeesch, ‘The legal agency of single mothers: Lawsuits over illegitimate children and the uses of legal aid to the poor in the Dutch town of Leiden (1750–1810)’, Journal of Social History 50:1 (2016), 51–73; Griet Vermeesch,

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time and place – not least in response to growing demand – it is clear that not all children admitted to orphanages were strictly ‘orphans’ in the sense of having experienced a double bereavement or solely the loss of their father. Some offspring were left in the care of orphanages or children’s hospitals (sometimes only temporarily) by parents who were unable to provide for their needs while also making a living or by parents who actively sought out the opportunities for their children’s training and the civic patronage offered by institutional care.90 In a quid pro quo that recognized the precarious balance between reproductive and productive labour, Stockholm’s orphanage permitted any wet-nurse they employed to bring her own child with her (in return for half her wage) and also gave her the option of leaving her child at the orphanage after a year of duty.91 Families seeking relief for their children were by no means exclusive to northern regions or simply a function of ‘nuclear family hardship’; larger families also deployed mixed care strategies, such as those who left children temporarily ‘in deposit’ in the Ospedale di Caritá in Turin.92 Church and state were, therefore, massive employers of care workers, providing employment for poor women and shaping possible responses to illegitimacy. Mothers of illegitimate children often faced no choice around whether they could keep their infants, or they were forced to choose between undertaking productive work or nursing their own children, and they could only do the latter with parochial or familial support. Such women faced heavy pressure to prioritize productive work over reproductive labour, resulting in a high proportion of illegitimate babies being given up, either temporarily or permanently.93 The resulting care chains prioritized others’ care needs when mothers of illegitimate children served as wet-nurses to babies other than their own. In seventeenth-century Aberdeen, for example, the same single women

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‘Facing illegitimate motherhood in eighteenth-century Antwerp: The impact of institutional settings on the experiences of single mothers’, Continuity and Change 34 (2019), 117–37. See also Anne E. McCants, Civic Charity in a Golden Age: Orphan Care in Early Modern Amsterdam (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Thomas Max Safley, Charity and Economy in the Orphanages of Early Modern Augsburg (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1997). See, e.g., Carol Kazmierczak Manzione, ‘Identity, placement, and circulation of the children of Christ’s Hospital’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 6:3 (2013), 428–55; Thomas Max Safley, Children of the Laboring Poor: Expectation and Experience Among the Orphans of Early Modern Augsburg (Leiden: Brill, 2005). Susanna Hedenborg, ‘To breastfeed another woman’s child: Wet-nursing in Stockholm, 1777–1937’, Continuity and Change 16:3 (2001), 399–422. Sandra Cavallo, ‘Family obligations and inequalities in access to care in northern Italy, seventeenth to eighteenth centuries’, in Peregrine Horden and Richard Smith (eds.), The Locus of Care: Families, Communities, Institutions and the Provision of Care since Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1998), 90–110. Helen Berry, Orphans of Empire: The Fate of London’s Foundlings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

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who were shamed and penalized for fornication were recruited as live-in wetnurses within days or weeks of their delivery – often serving the families of parish elders – in order to pay the financial penalties for their crime and to cover the cost of putting their own babies out to nurse.94 There are similarities here between European practices and the colonial and global co-option of women’s reproductive capacities, most obviously in service of the Atlantic slave trade.95 Enslaved women’s reproductive labour was both enforced through rape and/or their deployment as wet nurses and denied by slaveholders, who insisted that enslaved mothers undertake gruelling productive labour that was incompatible with taking responsibility for their own infants’ care.96 Beyond the coercive extremes of the early modern care economy lay a vibrant market for care services that served to benefit some care providers as well as their employers. Care services constituted a significant component of the early modern economy as well as part of the infrastructure which enabled that economy to function. Particularly in commercialized and commercializing regions a complex care market supplied a range of services such as wetnursing, nurse-keeping, day care, sick care, ‘charring’, laundry, and food provision. Care was commercially supplied by an army of women (alongside a minority of men) who took on a wide range of roles sometimes permanently and professionally, but more often in conjunction with other work, temporarily and intermittently. Care provision was one of the many piecemeal tasks undertaken in a pluri-active labour market, but it also provided some practitioners with a clear occupational identity and long-term employment. Writing off all women’s care work simply as low-paid ‘drudgery’ does a disservice to the complexity of tasks commercially undertaken by care providers, the range of skills involved and the variation in remuneration.97 Women were important among the ranks of healers in early modern Europe,

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Gordon DesBrisay, ‘Wet nurses and unwed mothers in seventeenth-century Aberdeen’, in Elizabeth Ewan and Maureen M. Meikle (eds.), Women in Scotland c.1100–c.1750 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999), 210–20. See also Mary Lindemann, ‘Love for hire: The regulation of the wet-nursing business in eighteenth-century Hamburg’, Journal of Family History 6:4 (1981), 379–95, especially 389–91. Diana Paton, ‘Gender history, global history and Atlantic slavery’, American Historical Review 127:2 (222), 726–54. Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Sasha Turner, Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing and Slavery in Jamaica, 1770–1834 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017); Emily West with R. J. Knight, ‘Mothers’ milk: Slavery, wetnursing, and black and white women in the Antebellum South’, Journal of Southern History 83:1 (2017), 37–68; Diana Paton, ‘The driveress and the nurse: Childcare, working children and other work under Caribbean slavery’, Past & Present 246 (2020), 27–53. Peter Earle, ‘The female labour market in London in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries’, Economic History Review 42:3 (1989), 328–53.

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providing cure as well as care. Recent work on the porous boundaries between household and commercial medicine has done much to modify an older historiographical narrative of women’s exclusion from medical practice with growing professionalization. Although female practitioners were mostly barred from formal medical training, they were far more prolific and influential than a simple study of occupational titles and/or formal qualifications would suggest and they were regularly called upon for their expertise in the medical marketplace.98 London parishes, for example, regularly paid women for healthcare, including boarding children who were sick or lame and providing remedies to heal a wide range of afflictions, besides personal care. Women healers were central to public health strategies.99 Midwives were prominent among such women who were routinely recognized and respected as ‘fixtures within . . . community health networks.’100 Of all the female practitioners, midwives were widely accorded something akin to professional recognition in the form of licensing and regulation, even though they could be subject to the condescension and suspicion of medical authorities (which intensified with the gradual emergence of man-midwifery from the later seventeenth century). The medical expertise of midwives informed courtroom disputes over reproductive issues, and they were considered experts on infant care as well as on pregnancy and birth.101 In institutional settings, women undertook managerial and/or administrative roles alongside the provision of care and training. Besides educating their charges, the widows who founded and ran the conservatories for orphaned girls in sixteenth-century Florence conducted extensive fund-raising to support

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See especially Susan Broomhill, Women’s Medical Work in Early Modern France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Monica Green, ‘Gendering the history of women’s healthcare’, Gender & History 20:3 (2008), 487–518; Cathy McClive, ‘Blood and expertise: The trials of the female medical expert in the Ancien-Régime courtroom’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82:1 (2008), 86–108; Sharon T. Strocchia, ‘Women and healthcare in early modern Europe’, Renaissance Studies 28:4 (2014), 496–514; Annemarie Kinzelbach, ‘Women and healthcare in early modern German towns’, Renaissance Studies 28 (2014), 619–38; Sharon T. Strocchia, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). Richelle Munkhoff, ‘Poor women and parish public health in sixteenth-century London’, Renaissance Studies 28:4 (2014), 579–96. See also J. Stevens Crawshaw, ‘Families, medical secrets and public health in early modern Venice’, Renaissance Studies 28:4 (2014), 596–618. Deborah E. Harkness, ‘A view from the streets: Women and medical work in Elizabethan London’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82 (2008), 52–85, especially 69. Merry Wiesner, ‘Early modern midwifery: A case study’, in Barbara Hanawalt (ed.), Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1986), 94–113; Jacques Gélis, Fertility, Pregnancy and Birth in Early Modern Europe, trans. Rosemary Morris (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1991); Hilary Marland (ed.), The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe (London: Routledge, 1993); Liane McTavish, Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Hardwick, Sex in an Old Regime City, ch. 5.

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their work and appointed clerics (although their activities became increasingly curtailed by counter-reformation strictures).102 The ‘Madri’ (mothers) of institutions in eighteenth-century Turin were assisted by ‘sottomadri’ (submothers) and governesses and had authority over nurses, seamstresses, laundresses and cooks, besides the inmates.103 Ariadne Schmidt’s study of the gender division of labour in the orphanages of Gouda, Utrecht and Leiden concluded that ‘[w]elfare institutions were among the few areas in which Dutch women could be found in leading positions during the early modern period.’ Orphan mothers were responsible for provisions, supervising female staff and overseeing the orphans’ belongings.104 The matrons in London hospitals undertook similarly extensive responsibilities. In Christ’s Hospital (established to care for foundlings and orphans) the matron managed a staff of 25 nursing sisters. The material goods of a hospital or orphanage, accounted for by matrons and orphan mothers, were equivalent to the assets of a large household, and their oversight and careful preservation was an important form of financial management alongside careful provisioning and the regulation of consumption. The women who undertook such managerial roles as institutional ‘mothers’ were relatively well remunerated when their pay is compared with the wages paid to nurses and caregivers (although not when compared to the retainers commanded by male physicians, surgeons or apothecaries).105 Some women also provided paid care for multiple children on the smaller scale of their own households, which functioned as semi-professional establishments. In later seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century London, parish nurses played a significant role in parochial welfare strategies, some running sizeable establishments for the care of children, orphans, pregnant paupers, the sick and the homeless deemed worthy of parish support. They provided diet, lodging and personal care, employed servants to assist them and earned themselves ‘a modest level of comfort’, albeit not sufficient income to place them among rate payers. Such services were gradually side-lined by the emergence of workhouses from the second quarter of the eighteenth

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Nicholas Terpstra, ‘Mothers, sisters, and daughters: Girls and conservatory guardianship in late Renaissance Florence’, Renaissance Studies 17:2 (2003), 201–29. See also Sandra Cavallo, Charity and Power in Early Modern Italy: Benefactors and their Motives in Turin 1541–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Beatrice Zucca Micheletto, ‘Working in and for charity institutions: Patterns of employment and actors in the early modern Savoy-Piedmont state (17th-19th centuries)’, Mediterranea – ricerche storiche 48 (2020), 199–222. Ariadne Schmidt, ‘Managing a large household: The gender division of work in orphanages in Dutch towns in the early modern period, 1580–1800’, History of the Family 13:1 (2008), 42–57, especially 53. Harkness, ‘View from the streets’, 74–76. See also Alexandra Shepard, ‘Crediting women in the early modern English economy’, History Workshop Journal 79 (2015), 1–24.

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century.106 By contrast, some Dutch women expanded and consolidated the scale of their care services alongside the growing professionalization and bureaucratization of orphanages in the eighteenth century, as childcare became concentrated among fewer nursing women with higher numbers of charges. One woman in eighteenth-century Leiden cared for 29 children during a fiveyear period.107 It was more common, however, for children’s nurses to take on only one or possibly two children at any one time. The multitude of nurses who not only fed but also – perhaps more crucially – provided round-the-clock childcare contributed a hefty chunk of the labour power required by the early modern childcare economy and indeed the early modern economy more generally. According to one estimate, there was one wet-nurse for every 18 members of the population in late eighteenth-century Hamburg.108 Another tranche of nurses was engaged to ‘keep’ children in their own households at the behest of institutions, parishes and private individuals. Valerie Fildes concluded that, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, wet-nursing in the parishes within easy reach of London ‘was practised on such a scale that it can be classed as a cottage industry’, with artisan wives taking in a succession of nurslings from the capital.109 Even medical tracts promoting maternal breast-feeding conceded that wet-nursing involved skill and expertise and deserved some occupational recognition.110 Additional nurses were employed in institutional settings and, over the course of the eighteenth century, increasing numbers of wet-nurses tended infants in the households of wealthier private employers – working as live-in servants rather than taking children in to nurse. Many such women were single mothers of illegitimate children, recruited from lying-in hospitals or offering their services via newspapers advertising the quality of their milk and their characters. Such advertisements often claimed that the nurse’s own infant had recently died, reassuring potential employers that her milk was newly come in and uncompromized by competing claims.111 In practice, many a wet-nurse put her own infant out to nurse in care chains that accrued value to the wealthier employer, privileging the employer’s child above the nurse’s own offspring.

106 107 109 110 111

Jeremy Boulton, ‘Welfare systems and the parish nurse in early modern London, 1650–1725’, Family and Community History 10:2 (2007), 127–51, especially 143. 108 Schmidt, ‘Managing a large household’, 48. Lindemann, ‘Love for hire’, 385. Valerie Fildes, ‘The English wet-nurse and her role in infant care 1538–1800’, Medical History 32:2 (1988), 142–73, especially 169. Shepard, ‘Pleasures and pains of breastfeeding’. Marissa C. Rhodes, ‘Domestic vulnerabilities: Reading families and bodies into eighteenthcentury Anglo-Atlantic wet nurse advertisements’, Journal of Family History 40:1 (2015), 39–63.

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Working conditions and remuneration for nurses varied considerably depending on the setting in which they were employed, as well as between regions according to local custom and labour markets. There was a sliding social scale. Women serving in elite households were among the best paid servants. The Pasiegas who migrated from northern Spain to serve as wetnurses in well-to-do urban households were married women whose income enabled significant capital accumulation for their own family economies. They commanded wages equivalent to an apprentice carpenter, with plenty more in kind in terms of food, lodging and clothing.112 Married women who took in more fortunate children to nurse in their own households participated in a relatively lucrative by-employment, especially when engaged by private employers in return for a decent wage and various perquisites. The wages paid by the English gentleman Sir Roger Townshend in the early seventeenth century were equivalent to the annual stipend of his upper-level male servants.113 But beyond these positions of relative privilege, infant care was less attractive than manufacturing work such as straw-plaiting and lacemaking, a contrast which accounted for a shift away from wet-nursing in London’s hinterland in the later eighteenth century.114 Similarly, care work was less lucrative than manufacturing work in Dutch orphanages. There, nurses were paid less than seamstresses but more than local maidservants.115 Institutionally placed nurslings generated lower rewards than privately placed infants for rural nurses, who in eighteenth-century England were paid less than half a labourer’s wage by the London Foundling Hospital. Nonetheless, this still provided sufficient incentive for the wives of agricultural labourers and artisans to take in foundling children alongside caring for children of their own, without apparent jeopardy to the latter.116 At the bottom end of the scale were the poorer women who took in nurslings even though they could become an ‘excessive burden to households where mothers were already too poorly

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Carmen Sarasúa, ‘Leaving home to help the family? Male and female temporary migrants in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spain’, in Pamela Sharpe (ed.), Women, Gender and Labour Migration: Historical and Global Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2001), 48–78. Linda Campbell, ‘Wet-nurses in early modern England: Some evidence from the Townshend archive’, Medical History 33:3 (1989), 360–70. See also Jane Whittle and Elizabeth Griffiths, Consumption and Gender in the Early Seventeenth-Century Household: The World of Alice Le Strange (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 170–74. Fildes, ‘English wet-nurse’, 143. See also Fiona Newall, ‘Wet nursing and child care in Aldenham, Hertfordshire, 1595–1726: Some evidence on the circumstances and effects of seventeenth-century child rearing practices’, in Valerie Fildes (ed.), Women as Mothers in Preindustrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren (London: Routledge, 1990). Schmidt, ‘Managing a large household’, 51. Valerie Fildes, Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998), ch. 11.

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nourished to provide milk for their own infants’.117 In some cases, foundlings infected their nurses with syphilis, posing an active threat to their lives and livelihoods.118 Paid nursing work, therefore, ranged from a specialized service that was reasonably well remunerated to a form of extraction that placed both carers and those cared for at risk. Foster care and the care of older children were also monetized. The arrangements made for orphaned, poor or abandoned children who were weaned typically paid less than wet-nursing, although, in the case of older children, fostering families might expect to gain benefit from their labour.119 Some care of older children was supplied on a weekly or daily basis, rather than as a fulltime commitment. Children might be boarded out during the working week or taken in daily to ‘dame schools’ run by women to provide elementary education and childcare. In the mid-eighteenth century, there were 24 women who ran nursery schools (‘bewaarschool’) in the city of Gouda. Children could attend these schools from around the age of two. At this point in time, Gouda had a population of about 13,000 inhabitants.120 Remuneration in such cases could be piecemeal and temporary, but it still constituted welcome supplementary income to household economies and it was probably accompanied by other makeshifts such as sewing, spinning or knitting work. Indeed, some women combined their manufacturing work with teaching children to learn the same skills. Alongside these varieties of direct care, there was a massive market for indirect care services such as laundry, cleaning and food preparation. Much of this work was performed by domestic servants, who could also be called on to provide hands-on care. London artisanal families were disproportionately likely to hire servants – most likely in order to free up the skilled labour of married women. Some evidence suggests that, more generally, families with 117

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Emilie L. Bergmann, ‘Milking the poor: Wet-nursing and the sexual economy of early modern Spain’, in Eukene Lacarra Lanz (ed.), Marriage and Sexuality in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (New York: Routledge, 2002), 90–114, 107. See also James R. Lehning, ‘Family life and wetnursing in a French village’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12:4 (1982), 645–56; George D. Sussman, Selling Mothers’ Milk: The Wet-Nursing Business in France 1715–1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982). David I. Kertzer, ‘Syphilis, foundlings, and wetnurses in nineteenth-century Italy’, Journal of Social History 32:3 (1999), 589–602. Steve Hindle, ‘“Waste” children? Pauper apprenticeship under the Elizabethan poor laws, c. 1598–1697’, in Penelope Lane, Neil Raven and K. D. M. Snell (eds.), Women, Work and Wages in England, 1600–1850 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2004), 15–46; Cavallo, Charity and Power; Micheletto, ‘Working in and for charity institutions’. See also Andrea Caracausi, ‘Beaten children and women’s work in early modern Italy’, Past & Present 222 (2014), 95–128. Streekarchief Holland Midden, Archive Gilden, inv.no. 113, 22-3-1749; N. D. B. Habermehl, ‘Leven in de schaduw van de dood’, in P. H. A. M. Abels, K. Goudriaan and N. D. B. Habermehl, Duizend jaar Gouda. Een stadsgeschiedenis (Verloren: Hilversum, 2002), 296–307, especially 296. I owe these references to Ariadne Schmidt.

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young children were more likely to employ servants.121 In addition, outsourced laundry services, charring work and victualling all supported care provision in general and childcare particularly. The task of washing babies’ napkins, swaddling bands, bedding and clothing was delegated to domestic servants or farmed out to laundresses, who often worked in miserable and dangerous conditions.122 Seamstresses were employed to produce or mend children’s clothing, at an institutional level or in service of the needs of private households. Some of these tasks fell within the remit of domestic servants, but it is clear that sizeable proportions of married women and widows contributed these services to the market economy. Of the ever-married women who detailed sources of income in the English church courts, 20 per cent of wives and 12 per cent of widows reported undertaking nursing or medical services and 10 per cent of wives and 15 per cent of widows mentioned laundry and charring work. Seventeen per cent of wives and 23 per cent of widows maintained themselves by making and/or mending clothes.123 This substantial market for childcare and for indirect care services did not exist simply because parental loss and child abandonment was a feature of early modern life. Rather, it was designed to enable the productive work of women with skills and/or assets that were more valuable to their family economies than their care work (paid or unpaid). When permitted by the moral climate, a market for care services and a labour market for women, or when forced by poverty, it made economic sense for adult women to prioritize productive labour above the reproductive labour that could be parcelled out or delegated relatively cheaply. Simplest put, although women’s productive work was less well remunerated than men’s, it was often more valuable than all but the most specialized care work. Where unpaid familial labour was not available to supply care and in situations when women were not forced to choose between productive and reproductive work by giving up their infants, commercial care provision facilitated women’s work as well as men’s. Many smaller households, of course, particularly in rural regions and where resources were scarce, had no option but to combine work and care in ways which could jeopardize the health of both carers and cared-for. However, the distribution of childcare beyond birth parents was often a key factor in family strategies. The ‘two-supporter model’ was itself upheld by a nexus of care 121

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D. A. Kent, ‘Ubiquitous but invisible: Female domestic servants in mid-eighteenth-century London’, History Workshop Journal 28 (1989), 111–28; Jane Whittle, ‘Housewives and servants in rural England, 1440–1650: Evidence of women’s work from probate documents’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 15 (2005), 51–74. Steedman, ‘Boiling copper’; Patricia E. Malcolmson, ‘Laundresses and the laundry trade in Victorian England’, Victorian Studies 24:4 (1981), 439–62; Carole Rawcliffe, ‘A marginal occupation? The medieval laundress and her work’, Gender & History 21:1 (2009), 147–69. Shepard, ‘Crediting women’, 12.

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provision that was at least partially designed to maximize the productivity of married women whose skills and assets were integral to early modern household economies. From Variation to a Variable It is clear that care work was anything but constant in the early modern period and it cannot be neatly factored in as a kind of handicap that uniformly affected women and their productive capacity across place and time.124 The nature and distribution of care work varied along with the size and character of the care burden; according to household structures and family strategies; and in relation to regional economies and labour markets. While the bulk of care work was carried out by women, it certainly did not exclude men. And, although the distribution of care work largely consolidated gender hierarchies, the delegation of care work also compounded inequalities between women and between households. It is beyond the scope of this essay to schematize the role of care regimes in shaping variability in economic performance across Europe, but I hope to have established some of the approaches that might be taken forward in this endeavour. It is likely that the majority of care work in early modern Europe was unpaid, fit in around other tasks and extensively distributed within households and beyond through networks of kinship and alliance. The value of this care provision should not be overlooked but included in assessments of early modern economic activity. Unpaid care can be accounted for as part of the ‘subsistence services’ that enabled the early modern economy to function.125 Unpaid care involved men as well as women, and its provision depended on many variables that differed between places and over time. The value of such work can be established in terms of the market equivalents of caring contributions, not least because care work in early modern Europe was often widely dispersed beyond unpaid familial provision. Much of this delegation of care work was formally managed by institutions and local authorities, but it was also privately arranged by myriad households through the market. Both public and private demands for care services sustained a large commercial care sector. The wages paid to women to nurse, board or ‘keep’ children can therefore be used to calculate the value of unpaid childcare. When situated in relation to the wage women might command for other types of work it also becomes possible to estimate the relative value of women’s productive and reproductive labour and the ways in which this might have shaped family strategies. Although contemporary commentators condemned mothers who placed their 124 125

Broadberry et al., British Economic Growth. Whittle, ‘Critique of approaches to “domestic work”’.

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infants with wet-nurses as lazy or selfish, in the majority of cases wet-nursing was sought by couples in order to maximize the wife’s productive potential, particularly if she had skills that generated more income than the cost of farming a baby out. This may well have been the logic of Claude Page, a Lyonnais textile worker, and his wife Catherine Hedelin, who sent every other one of their nine children out to nurse.126 The relative value of productive and reproductive work within a household economy could be very finely balanced, informing practices designed to maximize earning capacity and minimize care costs. When choices were limited and livelihoods stretched, the extreme end of this spectrum was child neglect or child abandonment. In this setting, drawing on institutional provision was not necessarily a last resort but a means of supplementing care requirements. Many of the wet-nurses who facilitated wealthier households’ productive work in turn took advantage of the gap between their earnings and the lower cost of placing their own infants out to even cheaper sources of care. Nurses serving elite families – like the Pasiegas of northern Spain – could generate significant returns that were ploughed back into their family economies, trumping the value of any productive work available to them. More often, commercial care work was less lucrative than productive work, although more highly valued than many forms of domestic service or indirect care. Besides providing paid employment for a significant proportion of the female population, then, care work was economically significant because it enabled the productive work of other women as well as men. We might surmise that the more complex the care economy – in terms of the range of care services that were commercially available – the more choices there were for skilled women to delegate care and sustain their productive capacity through their childbearing years. In the case of these relatively fortunate women, access to a market for care services, or the means to delegate care to unpaid sources, might be approached as another variable shaping levels of ‘girlfriendliness’ – or at the very least rates of female productivity – in early modern Europe. Any such ‘girlfriendliness’, however, did not extend to poorer women who, especially in cases of illegitimate birth, faced dire choices between prioritizing productive labour and/or selling reproductive services above their own children’s welfare. The extent to which much of the actual care work might be dubbed ‘girlfriendly’ to those performing it is also questionable. It is important to remain

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Julie Hardwick, ‘Parasols and poverty: Conjugal marriage, global economy, and rethinking the consumer revolution’, in Simon Middleton and James E. Shaw (eds.), Market Ethics and Practices, c.1300–1850 (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 129–49, 139. See also Julie Hardwick, ‘Fractured domesticity in the Old Regime: Families and goods in global eighteenth-century France’, American Historical Review 124 (2019), 1267–77.

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mindful of the extractive dynamic governing care provision in capitalist systems which devalue reproductive labour (both paid and unpaid) in relation to productive activity, even though the latter depends upon the former.127 The care regimes of early modern Europe were situated in a widening colonial and global context in this regard, which gradually lengthened the reach of care chains and sharpened their coercive extremes. As Diana Paton has recently shown, the extraction of reproductive labour in service of capital accumulation powered the Atlantic slave trade – a point routinely overlooked by historians of capitalism and global history.128 A historiographical focus on growth underlies this oversight, most often by treating unpaid care as external to the economy so that it remains unaccounted for as part of the work required to generate ‘progress’. Even when care is considered, the historiographical privileging of growth as the measure of economic performance overlooks the costs to carers whose reproductive labour was appropriated or poorly valued. Prioritizing well-being as the measure of economic performance might promote more historiographical recognition of the work of producing and supporting life through care. Either way – whether we measure growth or well-being (or the relationship between them) – the work of care must become a core component in our analysis.

127 128

Susan Ferguson, Women and Work: Feminism, Labour and Social Reproduction (London: Pluto Press, 2020). Paton, ‘Gender history’.

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3

Agriculture Jane Whittle and Hilde Sandvik

Introduction Agriculture dominated the economy of early modern Europe. Yet the contribution of women to the agricultural workforce in this period is often ignored and over-simplified. To take one example recently published in a top economics journal: Harvard and UCLA economists Alesina, Guiliano and Nunn argue that in societies ‘that traditionally practiced plough agriculture . . . men tended to work outside the home in the fields, while women specialized in activities within the home’ and attempt to show that the historical practice of plough agriculture correlates with modern cultural assumptions of the woman’s place being in the home.1 Their article classifies the whole of Europe as an area of plough agriculture and argues that use of the plough was associated with an increased male dominance of the tasks of ‘land clearance, soil preparation, crop tending and harvesting’, but had little impact on women’s involvement in tasks such as ‘caring for small animals, caring for large animals, milking, cooking, fuel gathering, water fetching’, as well as ‘handicraft production and trading’. These findings, they say, ‘are consistent with women working less in societies that traditionally used the plough’.2 To support these sweeping statements, Alesina et al. refer to no historical studies at all, but instead draw data from compilations of ethnographic studies by Murdock and White, which itself codifies ethnographic research undertaken in the 1960s and earlier.3 As such, the article illustrates a series of common problems in academic approaches to women’s work in agriculture. These include failing to use the available evidence; mistaking ideological statements and generalizations about gendered work patterns for descriptions of actual work patterns; overgeneralization about work patterns; equating lesser involvement in arable agriculture with working ‘within the home’; assuming that if women did not

1 2 3

Alberto Alesina, Paola Guiliano and Nathan Nunn, ‘On the origins of gender roles: Women and the plough’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 128 (2013), 469–530, 470–71. Alesina, Guiliano and Nunn, ‘Origins of gender roles’, 482, 487. Alesina, Guiliano and Nunn, ‘Origins of gender roles’, 478–82.

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work in the same way as men then they worked less; and oversimplifying the causes of gendered work patterns. Historical studies of early modern Europe do not question women’s involvement in agriculture but, relative to the number of women involved, this form of work draws remarkably little attention and tends to be presented as a static form of traditional work. There is no comparative study of women’s work in early modern European agriculture. The topic occupies only a few pages in survey histories of women’s lives and work such as Merry Wiesner-Hanks’ Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe and Deborah Simonton’s A History of European Women’s Work: 1700 to the Present.4 A recent survey of rural economy and society in north-western Europe does address the gender division of labour, but only with a paragraph or so for each region.5 This leads to more generalizations. Thus, for Scandinavia it is stated that men ‘were in general associated with outdoor labour in the fields’, while ‘female work included indoor duties but also the tending of cattle, sheep and poultry, milking and work connected with various products such as brewing, slaughtering, salting, smoking meat and the production of textiles from wool and linen’.6 Yet, as is discussed in the ‘Two Case Studies’ section, women dominated coastal Norway’s agricultural workforce, including much of arable agriculture, while for Sweden Maria Ågren and collaborators have demonstrated that women were involved in grain cultivation and forestry.7 Women’s greater involvement in livestock farming in comparison to arable farming is a persistent theme, but one that is based on little detailed analysis. This argument was recently taken up by Voigtländer and Voth.8 The authors argue that the switch from arable to pastoral agriculture after the Black Death led to a concomitant increased demand for women’s labour, kick-starting the low-pressure demographic regime of late marriage known as the European Marriage System, which in turn explained the rising economic dominance of north-west Europe. Voigtlander and Voth argue that ‘because plow agriculture

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Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 105–10; Deborah Simonton, A History of European Women’s Work: 1700 to the Present (London: Routledge, 1998), 27–36. Simonton discusses farm work after 1800 in other sections. Eric Vanhaute, Isabelle Devos and Thijs Lambrecht (eds.), Rural Economy and Society in NorthWestern Europe: Making a Living: Family, Income and Labour, 500–2000 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 53–54, 109–10, 167–68, 275. Vanhaute, Devos and Lambrecht (eds.), Rural Economy and Society, 275. Jonas Lindström, Rosemarie Fiebranz and Göran Rydén, ‘The diversity of work’, in Maria Ågren (ed.), Making a Living, Making a Difference: Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 24–56, 30–33. Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth, ‘How the West “invented” fertility restriction’, American Economic Review 103 (2013), 2227–64.

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requires physical strength, women have a comparative advantage in livestock farming’ and thus ‘female employment opportunities improved’ after the Black Death.9 They conclude ‘female labour is better suited to shepherding and milking than to ploughing and threshing’, citing the article just discussed by Alesina et al., and ‘the sexual division of labor in isolated tribes studied by anthropologists’.10 They also assume women’s farm work ‘mainly took the form of farm service’; and as farm service was undertaken by young unmarried women, rising work opportunities led to increased age at marriage.11 There is little historical evidence to support this argument. Ogilvie has shown that, in south-west Germany there was little difference between men’s and women’s contribution to pastoral or arable agriculture, women’s contributions to both types of farming were considerable and made by women at all stages of the life-cycle.12 The case study of south-west England presented in the ‘Two Case Studies’ section draws similar conclusions for that region.13 Within English agrarian history, the idea that women found more employment in pastoral economies can be traced back to Snell. In Annals of the Labouring Poor, discussing contrasts between English regions in the eighteenth century, he notes that ‘that female specialisation in livestock, dairying and haymaking, while adversely affecting women in the east, may have been more favourable for them in the west’ and ‘as the eighteenth century progressed, the simple formula – of female involvement in pastoral activities and of men in the harvest – became more applicable’.14 This idea was taken up by Goldberg in his examination of women’s work in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Goldberg argued that ‘pastoral agriculture with its dairy component and opportunity for by-employments, appears to have offered more scope for the employment of women (and servants) than was true of arable husbandry with its more seasonal labour requirements’.15 It should be stressed, however, that both Snell and Goldberg were quite tentative in these assertions, as neither had direct evidence of women’s employment in agriculture. Snell’s conclusions were based on changes in late eighteenth-century agricultural

9 10 11 12 13

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Voigtländer and Voth, ‘How the West’, 2228. Voigtländer and Voth, ‘How the West’, 2259–60. Voigtländer and Voth, ‘How the West’, 2228–29. Sheilagh Ogilvie, A Bitter Living: Women, Markets, and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 124, 143. See also Jeremy Edwards and Sheilagh Ogilvie, ‘Did the Black Death cause economic development by “inventing” fertility restriction?’, CESifo Working Papers 7016 (2018), available at: https://www.ssrn.com/index.cfm/en/ (last accessed 27 November 2019), especially 15–21. K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 45, 49. P. J. P. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 355.

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methods and his impressions about regional differences in women’s agricultural wages; Goldberg was seeking to explain differences between regions in the sex ratios recorded in the late fourteenth century English Poll Tax and was discussing work opportunities more generally (including cloth production) rather than just agriculture. Detailed studies of a range of European regions show that almost all these assumptions are unfounded. Women did sometimes plough and thresh, but more significantly found plentiful employment in other aspects of arable farming such as sowing, weeding and harvesting. Women monopolized milking in most early modern European societies, but their involvement in herding beef cattle or sheep varied by region. Studies of the work women actually did in the agricultural economy, including those presented in this chapter, demonstrate that there was a great deal of variation between countries, regions and even farms, which in turn reveals the flexibility of both agricultural systems and the gender division of labour.16 What Alesina et al. and Voigtlander and Voth do demonstrate is that having an adequate knowledge of women’s agricultural work in historic societies matters. It contributes to the understanding of demographic change, of labour productivity and estimates of GDP. Of course, most of all, it matters because how we understand women’s lives and value women’s contribution to past societies and economies matters and influences modern attitudes to women’s place in economy and society. The following two sections provide an overview of the latest research on women’s work in agriculture. They review a range of factors affecting the gender division of labour in agriculture before examining the variety of gendered agricultural systems found in early modern Europe. The final part of the chapter offers two detailed case studies from regions with contrasting patterns of gendered work. In coastal Norway women dominated agricultural work while men followed other occupations; in south-west England women contributed around a third of agricultural work, but nonetheless undertook a wide range of tasks in both arable and pastoral agriculture. The case studies also introduce the range of sources and research methods than can be used to investigate women’s agricultural work. The aim of the chapter is to demonstrate that many generalizations about women’s work in agriculture are based on the false assumption not only that the types of work women did, but the reasons why they did that work, were static and universal. To understand the influence of women’s work on economic change it is necessary to acknowledge the many differences that existed, across time and geography, in the gender division of labour.

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Ogilvie, Bitter Living, 119.

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Explaining the Gender Division of Labour In her survey of women and gender in early modern Europe, Wiesner-Hanks summarizes the causes of men’s and women’s different work patterns in the countryside: These gender divisions were partly the result of physical difference, with men generally doing tasks that required a great deal of upper-body strength, such as cutting grain with a scythe. They were partly the result of women’s greater responsibility for child-care, so that women carried out tasks closer to the house . . . They were partly the result of cultural beliefs, so that women in parts of Norway, for example, sowed all grain because people felt this would ensure a bigger harvest.17

In this section we argue that these commonly recited explanations are oversimplified and even, in some cases, inaccurate. A more sophisticated discussion of the causes behind the gender division of labour in rural societies is provided by Ogilvie.18 She groups existing explanations under three headings: technological, cultural and institutional. Technological explanations concentrate on women’s physical capability and how this interacts with different forms of work equipment such as ploughs and scythes. Cultural explanations cite patriarchy or custom as the underlying reason – which are seen as giving rise to ‘norms governing marriage, household structure, sexuality . . . education’ and so on. Institutional approaches examine the structures that organize society: particularly rules laid down as laws or regulations. Ogilvie’s framework is useful for thinking about explanations of gender differences in work patterns; however, as is demonstrated by the following discussion, in many cases it is necessary to explore a combination of these explanations, or to cite factors which do not sit easily in any of them, rather than choosing one or another. The rest of this section looks in turn at technology and physical strength, farm size and agricultural specialization, and alternative employments to agriculture as explanations of particular regional patterns of gender divisions in rural labour. It then considers different forms of employment and life-stages and finally the debate over the gender pay gap. Early modern agriculture was physically demanding. Many forms of work required strength and stamina. Joyce Burnette uses twentieth-century data from the US Army to show that, while men and women have similar capabilities in terms of activities such as running two miles and doing sit-ups, men are much better at lifting heavy weights due to their superior upper body 17

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Wiesner-Hanks, Women and Gender, 105–6. Wiesner-Hanks offers a more detailed and nuanced discussion in the fourth edition of her book: Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 119. Ogilvie, Bitter Living, 7–15.

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strength.19 Against this argument, however, there are two provisos. One is that averages do not indicate the capabilities of particular individuals and there is a great deal of overlap between the genders, so some women are stronger than some men. The other is that strength is not only a matter of innate ability but is also conditioned or developed by normal forms of work – so women who are expected to do strenuous forms of work from a young age will be stronger than those who are not.20 Physical strength interacted with technology in many forms of agricultural work in early modern Europe. Both women and men harvested grain with sickles, but only men are recorded using the scythe.21 The scythe was a quicker means of harvesting grain crops and required greater physical strength.22 While there is no physical barrier to women using a scythe,23 it is apparent that women were not taught this skill, thus strong women had no opportunity to earn the high wages paid for this activity. Other activities such as driving ploughs and carts and threshing grain were normally done by men, but sometimes by women on smaller farms or at times of particular need.24 This demonstrates that women were not incapable of doing these things. Women with physical strength were prized by employers as maid servants.25 Careful consideration suggests that physical strength may be an element in some differences between men’s and women’s work, but not all the difference, as the cultural assumptions of parents and employers barred women from becoming skilled in some activities, whether or not they had the physical ability to do them. The gender division of labour in agriculture was not fixed but varied between regions and changed over time as new activities and ways of organizing work were adopted. For instance, a higher proportion of agricultural work was done by women on smaller farms than on large farms. This can be demonstrated by the fact smaller farms employed a higher proportion of female servants compared to male servants than larger farms; as was the case in both

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Joyce Burnette, ‘An investigation of the female–male wage gap during the industrial revolution in Britain’, Economic History Review 50 (1997), 257–81, especially 275. Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 214–20. Michael Roberts, ‘Sickles and scythes: Women’s work and men’s work at harvest time’, History Workshop 7 (1979), 3–28. Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 12, 122–24. A female farmer in Cornwall reported using a scythe regularly to cut hay in the late twentieth century – personal communication. See section on south-west England. Ogilvie, Bitter Living, 126; Donald Woodward (ed.), The Farming and Memorandum Books of Henry Best of Elmswell 1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1984), 138.

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early modern Flanders and England.26 It is also indicated by the fact that women provided around 20 per cent of days worked by wage labourers on large farms in south-west England in 1650–1870,27 but performed around 37 per cent of total agricultural work tasks on all farms (including smaller farms) in the same region in 1550–1700.28 Christopher Pihl found a similar pattern on Swedish royal demesnes in 1539–1610: a higher proportion of women were employed on smaller demesnes.29 This demonstrates that women were useful and skilled agricultural workers, most commonly employed when a wide variety of different tasks needed to be performed. Robert Allen found that, on English farms in 1770, ‘employment per acre declined with size [of farms] for all categories of workers and especially for women and children’. However, his analysis of data collected by Arthur Young did not include female day labourers.30 Verdon’s more detailed examination of the employment of female day labourers employed on larger farms in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century using farm accounts shows female day labourers provided between 6 and 42 per cent of days worked by labourers, varying over time and by region.31 Another important influence on gendered work in agriculture was the availability of non-agricultural work. For instance, the high demand for female hand-spinners in eighteenth-century England may have caused some women to withdraw from agricultural work.32 Thus it is possible that, rather than women

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Thijs Lambrecht, ‘The institution of service in rural Flanders in the sixteenth century: A regional perspective’, and Jane Whittle, ‘A different pattern of employment: Servants in rural England c.1500–1660’, in Jane Whittle (ed.), Servants in Rural Europe 1400–1900 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2017), 37–55, 57–76, especially 43, 60–62. Helen V. Speechley, ‘Female and child agricultural day labourers in Somerset, c.1685–1870’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Exeter (1999), 57. Discussed in the section on south-west England; see also Jane Whittle and Mark Hailwood, ‘The gender division of labour in early modern England’, Economic History Review 73 (2020), 3–32, 12. Smaller demesnes employed 27–47 annual workers, of whom 34–49 per cent were female; on the largest estate, 258 workers were employed and only 10 per cent were female: Christopher Pihl, ‘Gender, labour and state formation in sixteenth-century Sweden’, Historical Journal 58 (2015), 685–710, 703. Robert Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman: The Agricultural Development of the South Midlands 1450–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 215. Arthur Young tabulated workers as servants, maids, boys and labourers. It was assumed by Young and Allen that servants and labourers were all male: Arthur Young, A Six Month Tour through the North of England, vol. 4 (London: W. Strahan, 1770), 385–95. Nicola Verdon, Rural Women Workers in 19th-Century England: Gender, Work and Wages (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002), 99–105. This labour was primarily engaged in hoeing, weeding, hay-making and some harvest work. Between 1590 and 1760, demand for spinners in England grew 700 per cent, while population increased by 64 per cent: Craig Muldrew, ‘“Th’ancient distaff and whirling spindle”: Measuring the contribution of spinning to household earnings and the national economy of England, 1550–1770’, Economic History Review 65 (2012), 498–526, 510, 519–21.

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being excluded from harvest work by the increased use of the scythe, as argued by Snell, women who made good earnings from spinning were less willing to do harvest work, and thus farmers had to find a way of harvesting with a smaller workforce – by using the scythe more often.33 Domestic service in towns also provided an alternative employment for women in many parts of Europe and attracted growing numbers of women as the size of urban populations increased.34 Conversely, elsewhere the availability of alternative employment for men led to women doing a higher share of agricultural work, as is discussed in the next two sections. Work not only varied by gender, but also by age and according to employment relations. Thus, over a lifetime, a woman might work as a child on her parents’ farm; as a servant on an employer’s farm; as a wife and widow on her own farm; and as a wage labourer on various neighbouring farms. Each of these stages and forms of employment was likely to involve somewhat different work repertoires. Ågren found that, in early modern Sweden, marital status and household position ‘were much more important in structuring work patterns and determining access to income than was gender’.35 Similarly, Whittle and Hailwood found that, in rural England, female servants did more agricultural work tasks than wives or widows, while wives did more commercial work tasks and widows more tasks involving care-work.36 In England the work of female servants differed substantially from that of female day labourers: servants were more likely to do dairying, food processing and marketing, while female day labourers were most likely to work in arable agriculture. The debate over the causes of the gender pay gap distils many of the issues discussed here. In an influential and carefully evidenced article, Burnette found that, in England during the period of the Industrial Revolution, differences in agricultural wages between men and women were primarily the consequence of differences in productivity rather than custom. Men had a higher productivity (per day worked) because of their greater physical strength and because they worked longer hours than women.37 These findings were applied to medieval England by Hatcher, who suggested female labourers were paid less in the late fourteenth century because they worked ‘fewer hours in the fields each day’ than men.38 Early nineteenth-century evidence does show that 33 34

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Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor, 50. For France, see Jeremy Hayhoe, ‘Rural servants in eastern France 1700–1872: Change and continuity over two centuries’, in Jane Whittle (ed.), Servants in Rural Europe 1400–1900 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2017), 149–54. See also Chapter 6. Maria Ågren, ‘Conclusion’, in Maria Ågren (ed.), Making a Living, Making a Difference: Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 204–20, 211. 37 Whittle and Hailwood, ‘Gender division of labour’, 22. Burnette, ‘Investigation’. John Hatcher, ‘Debate: women’s work reconsidered: Gender and wage differentiation in late medieval England’, Past & Present 173 (2001), 191–99, 194.

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female agricultural labourers often worked shorter days than men, arriving at 8 am and working for 10 hours, while men arrived at 6 am and worked 12 hours a day.39 However, there is no evidence of this pattern of work in earlier periods.40 It seems likely that the long hours worked by men in the early nineteenth century were a symptom of the harsh working conditions and low pay experienced by English agricultural workers at that time. Working these hours six days a week would not have been compatible with caring for one’s own land or livestock, as was often the case for labouring families in the earlier period.41 The legal maximum wage rates which were set in England annually for each county from 1563 onwards gave different wages for men and women, demonstrating a legal expectation that women would be paid less than men for doing the same tasks. For instance, women’s daily wages were 71 per cent of men’s for harvesting corn with a sickle and 64 per cent of men’s for haymaking.42 Humphries and Weisdorf demonstrate that the actual gap between male and female labourers’ wages was even greater, with men’s wages two or three times higher than women’s on average in England between 1550 and 1660.43 Despite equal wage legislation and equal access to education, the gender pay gap still exists in the present day. For hourly pay it stood at 18.4 per cent in the United Kingdom in 2017.44 Analysis demonstrates that 36 per cent of this gap can be explained: the most important factor is men and women working in different types of occupations (accounting for 23 per cent of the difference); and the fact women are more likely to work part-time than men was also important (accounting for 9 per cent of the difference).45 But most of the gap cannot be easily explained. If that is the case now, it seems highly unlikely that the pay gap in early modern agriculture – in a period when governments 39 40 41 42 43

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Burnette, ‘Investigation’, 268. The earliest evidence is from the 1790s. On the earlier period, see Mark Hailwood, ‘Time and work in rural England 1500–1700’, Past & Present 248 (2020), 87–121. Jane Whittle, ‘Land and people’, in Keith Wrightson (ed.), A Social History of England, c.1500–c.1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 152–73. From 21 wage assessments for reaping and 12 wage assessments for haymaking, dating from 1563 to 1595. Jane Humphries and Jacob Weisdorf, ‘The wages of women in England, 1260–1850’, Journal of Economic History 75 (2015), 405–47, 428. In 1500–50 and c.1660–1750 men’s wages were around 1.5 the size of women’s wages, and in 1550–c.1660 they were 2- or 3-times women’s wages. The wage assessments show men’s wages for reaping were 1.4 times larger than women’s, while for haymaking they were 1.5 times larger. The figure is 9.1 per cent for full-time workers. Office for National Statistics (ONS), ‘Gender pay gap in the UK, 2021’ (2021), figure 1, available at: www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandla bourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/bulletins/genderpaygapintheuk/2021 (last accessed 18 January 2022). ONS, ‘Understanding the gender pay gap’ (2018), section 6, 24–26, available at: www.ons.gov .uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/articles/understan dingthegenderpaygapintheuk/2018-01-17 (last accessed 3 December 2019).

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legislated to create unequal wages – can be explained only by average differences in physical strength. There are rarely simple explanations for particular divisions of labour between men and women in the rural economy. Rather than starting with assumptions that women were excluded from certain activities due to lack of upper body strength or childcare responsibilities we should start with the assumption that women could do almost anything and then examine what they did in particular regions and the range of influences that were at play. Adequate explanations can rarely be found by looking only at the labour market, at physical ability or at legal regulation or custom but instead these influences and others interacted, leading to particular outcomes in different times and places. Regional Economies and Gendered Work in Agriculture Sheep farming in Shetland and Iceland, grapes and olives in the Mediterranean, grain for export produced by serfs on Polish manors, wheat, peas and clover on enclosed, well manured fields in southern England: these illustrate some of the many forms for agricultural systems that existed in early modern Europe from north to south, and east to west. Europe’s geographical reach from 36 to 72 degrees north, with mountains, plains, valleys and coasts, speaks against any easy generalization about production in the early modern countryside and especially the gender division of labour. About 80 per cent of Europe’s population, which grew from perhaps 80 million in 1500 to 190 million in 1800, lived in the countryside. Here we highlight a selection of regions to underline the diversity of Europe’s farming practices and the gendered work arrangements that supported them. Southern Europe In the Mediterranean region, the cultivation of grain was combined with olives, viticulture and sheep farming. Emigh used the Catasto of 1427 to illuminate the gender division of labour in fifteenth-century Tuscany. She compared the work activities declared by men and women in single person households and found that, while both men and women produced wine and olives for the market, men were more likely to be involved in grain production than women. As grain was more often grown for subsistence, this meant that women were more engaged in agricultural production for the market, specializing in producing wine and olives on their smallholdings.46 In the area around Seville in 46

Rebecca Jane Emigh, ‘The gender division of labour: The case of Tuscan smallholders’, Continuity and Change 15 (2000), 117–37, 124–27.

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southern Spain in the early sixteenth century, agricultural labour by women and men alternated between work on their own small farms cultivating vines and waged work on large estates that grew wheat and olives. In winter and early spring, men worked for wages on the large estates, ploughing to prepare for cereal crops and tending olive groves. Meanwhile, on the smallholdings, women dug and hoed around the vines to allow them to absorb moisture from winter rain. Men then worked harvesting grain on the large estates in July and August, before returning to work on their own land, harvesting grapes in September. The olive harvest, in November to January, however, was largely the work of women, who left their smallholdings to work for wages in large groups on the estates, while men remained at home pruning the vines.47 Women’s paid labour in agriculture is evident elsewhere in Spain and Italy: on the island of Mallorca an agricultural workforce of male slaves was replaced on large estates in the fifteenth and sixteenth century with labourers paid low wages, around 50 per cent of whom were women.48 In the same period in the region of Arezzo in Italy women migrated from poorer areas to work as seasonal reapers in the grain harvest and women also laboured in the cultivation of woad.49 In inland Spain on the plains of la Mancha in the mid-eighteenth century, Sarasúa’s analysis of the Cadaster of Ensenada (1750–55) shows that rural women were typically employed in textile production. Men worked as agricultural labourers harvesting grain, grapes and olives, and were employed as shepherds caring for large transhumant sheep flocks.50 In contrast ‘women and girls worked in the fields in a limited number of situations’: they raised flax and laboured in family orchards, they made cheese and as widows might run farms but they were rarely employed as agricultural labourers. As a consequence, the primary sector (predominantly agriculture) was the main occupation of 60 per cent of men but only 3 per cent of women. In contrast, the secondary sector (largely textile production) occupied 24 per cent of men and 63 per cent of women.51 All these examples demonstrate flexible divisions of labour combining different elements of the economy.

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50 51

Mercedes Borrero Fernández, ‘Peasant and aristocratic women: Their role in the rural economy of Seville at the end of the Middle Ages’, in Marilyn Stone and Carmen Benito-Vessels (eds.), Women at Work in Spain: From the Middle Ages to Early Modern Times (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), 11–31, 14–15. Gabriel Jover-Avella, Antoni Mas-Forners, Ricard Soto-Company and Enrique Tello, ‘Socioecological transition in land and labour exploitation in Mallorca: From slavery to a low-wage workforce, 1229–1576’, Sustainability 11 (2019), 1–26, 19–20. Gabriella Piccinni, ‘Le donne nella mezzadria toscana delle origini’, in A. Cortonesi and G. Piccinni (eds.) Medioevo delle campagne. Rapporti di lavoro, politica agraria, forme della protesta (Rome: Viella, 2006), 153–203, 155. Carmen Sarasúa, ‘Women’s work and structural change: Occupational structure in eighteenthcentury Spain’, Economic History Review 72 (2018), 481–509, 491–92. Sarasúa, ‘Women’s work’, 494–95.

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Mountainous Regions Mitterauer contrasts the division of labour found in alpine farms in the Tyrol, with wine-producing smallholdings in lowland Austria. He notes that nearly all the work of viticulture could be done just as easily by women as by men, thus work was shared between the genders and widows often ran such farms without remarrying. In contrast, he argues, a ‘strict separation of work roles can be found among the mountain peasantry’ of the Austrian Alps, and ‘bringing in mountain hay, for example, is men’s work’.52 Yet he also notes the prevalence of seasonal out-migration from mountain communities, with adult men and young people of both genders migrating to work elsewhere during the summer, leaving married women to combine managing the farm and caring for young children. Viazzo finds a similar pattern in the Italian Alps in the mid-nineteenth century. He writes, ‘agriculture was the realm of women. Men’s realm was emigration – a seasonal emigration which took place in the summer and was therefore incompatible with the requirements of agricultural work’.53 In contrast to Mitterauer, Viazzo argues that ‘pastoral activities are less labour-intensive, and more suitable to women and children’, and the high Alps were dominated by pastoral agriculture. Young women took cows up to alpine pastures, while married and older women cultivated the fields near the village. Women managed the hay harvest by hiring boys or itinerant male labourers to mow the hay and by sending some of their cattle to winter in the lowlands, reducing the need for fodder.54 Similar accounts of women dominating agriculture due to seasonal male out-migration are found from other upland regions such as the Auvergne in central France. When Arthur Young visited this region in the 1780s, he reported that only women did farm work.55 These examples show not only women’s capability of managing agriculture largely without male labour but also the adaptability of gender roles and farming systems. Northern Europe Rural households in northern Europe struggled to make a living in a region where only 3–5 per cent of the land was arable. Between 58- and 71-degrees north population density was low, with about 4 inhabitants per square kilometre compared to 40 in France in the eighteenth century. Households made their living by combining agriculture with trades for export, such as fishing, 52 53 54 55

Michael Mitterauer, ‘Peasant and non-peasant family forms in relation to the physical environment and the local economy’, Journal of Family History 17 (1992), 139–59, 155. Pier Paolo Viazzo, Upland Communities: Environment, Population and Social Structure in the Alps since the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 103–4. Viazzo, Upland Communities, 110–16. Olwen Hufton, The Prospect before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, vol. 1, 1500–1800 (London: Harper Collins, 1995), 160–62.

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forestry, mining and tar- and charcoal-burning. Grain imports increased during the early modern period. Norway had imported grain since the Middle Ages and Sweden imported grain from the mid-seventeenth century onwards.56 The smallholders in this region relied on a mixture of arable and livestock with byemployment to pay for imported grain. A typical farm had between two and seven hectares of arable land for crops. Two oxen and four cows, sheep, goats and pigs were normal on southern Swedish farms. On the small farms in northern Scandinavia the light North Sea plough or ard was drawn by a single horse, as also happened in Scotland.57 When men were away, at sea or at war, women in Norway and Sweden ploughed.58 For those without draught animals, the cultivation of small farms with stony fields all over Scandinavia was done by spade.59 Inventories with spades for all household members and travel reports from western Norway indicate that all households’ able members, both men and women, took part in digging the fields. Transhumance to summer farms in the mountains was women’s work both in Norway and Sweden.60 On the summer farms women produced cheese and butter, often enough to pay both taxes and land rents. Milking was in general women’s work. The cows only gave milk during summer and were ‘dry’ during long winters in the byre due to the lack of fodder. Goats also gave milk and were the only affordable milking animal for many poor households. Women and children worked herding animals as the men were needed elsewhere.61 Slash and burn was the agricultural technique in eastern Finland. Rye was sown in the warm soil fertilized by ashes from old pine trees. This special rye could give enormous yields, 1:100 in the second year. After three years the plots were left as pasture for livestock and a new place was made ready to burn. Extended families did the heavy work together and rotated their field plots in the woodland, making new plots into arable fields and later pastures. In west Finland it was women’s work to plough the heavy soil with oxen.62 This work pattern was a consequence of households adapting to Swedish warfare in the seventeenth century, which conscripted Finnish boys and men. Men were 56 57 58 59

60 62

Janken Myrdal, ‘Farming and feudalism 1000–1700’, in Janken Myrdal and Mats Morell (eds.), Agrarian History of Sweden (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2011), 72–117. Myrdal, ‘Farming and feudalism’, 83. Janken Myrdal, Det svenska jordbrukets historia (Stockholm: Natur och Kultur/ LTs Förlag, 1999), 230, 309–17. Brynjulv Gjerdåker, Kontinuitet og modernitet 1814–1920, Norges landbrukshistorie Band. III (Oslo: Det Norske Samlaget, 2002), 30; Myrdal, ‘Farming and feudalism’, 84–85; Fartein Valen-Senstad, Norske landbruksredskaper 1800–1850-årene (Lillehammer: De Sandvigske samlingers skrifter IV, 1964), 28–38. 61 Myrdal, ‘Farming and feudalism’, 106. Myrdal, ‘Farming and feudalism’, 87. Ulla-Brit Lithell, Kvinnoarbete och barntillsyn i 1700- og 1800-talets Österbotten (Uppsala: Studia Historica, 1988), 156.

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sent to the war on the continent and about 30 per cent of Swedish and Finnish men died as a consequence.63 Tar was produced from pine roots; tar production was a male occupation and it was men’s work to transport the tar in bushels on riverboats south to the market towns by the Baltic Sea. Men made tar to raise money to hire a replacement so as to be excused from military service, and in the more peaceful eighteenth century, tar production continued to secure extra income for farming households. Later this was replaced by male migration to the cities for work, resulting over time in an agrarian regime dominated by female labour. Eastern Europe under Serfdom Across eastern and east-central Europe serfdom dominated economic relationships in the countryside from at least the late-sixteenth century to the lateeighteenth century. From eastern Germany to Russia, and from Bohemia to Lithuania, villagers were subject to a ‘second serfdom’ which demanded high payments from peasants and smallholders to manorial landlords in labour, cash and kind. In Poland, grain was produced for export. Men and women in serf households were obliged to work three, four or even more days per week for the manor. Bogucka concludes that ‘the common serf’s harsh fate contributed to the blurring of gender differences’.64 Men and women worked the fields and harvested; on their own holdings they normally had some livestock and a garden and women could produce yarn, butter, cheese, poultry and eggs for sale at weekly markets in the closest town. As a consequence, the little cash of the peasant household relied heavily on women’s market-oriented production.65 A similar situation was found in Lithuania. As serfs, men, women and children had to work four or five days a week, normally from Monday to Friday, for the manor. Unfree women who lived close to the manor wove, spun and tended the livestock for the lords.66 In Silesia cottage tenants were required to provide the daily labour of ‘two persons, namely both man and wife, or, instead of the latter, a capable maid, in all kinds of manor work, whatever it might be’. At harvest time they had to provide a third

63

64 65 66

Jan Lindegren, Utskrivning och utsugning: produktion och reproduktion i Bygdeå 1620–1640 [Conscription and exploitation: Production and reproduction in the parish of Bygdeå 1620–1640] (Uppsala: Studia Historica, 1980), 117. Maria Bogucka, Women in Early Modern Polish Society, against the European Background (London: Routledge, 2016), 39. Bogucka, Women, 38. Neringa Dambrauskaitė, ‘Noblemen’s familia: The life of unfree people on manors in the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century’, in Richard Butterwick and Wioletta Pawlikowska (eds.), Social and Cultural Relations in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: Microhistories (London: Routledge, 2019), 120–31, 125.

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labourer. Wives were allowed two weeks off after giving birth or six weeks at harvest time.67 For Russia, Glickman notes ‘women’s participation in heavy field-work and . . . the interchangeability of men’s and women’s field-work’ in the nineteenth century. An 11-year old girl from Moscow province who was asked about her work activities in 1880 listed spinning linen, knitting socks for sale, caring for livestock, cleaning the house, caring for younger children, threshing grain and binding sheaves.68 Late nineteenth-century photographs show girls threshing grain and women ploughing. Although from a later period they attest to heavy agricultural work being commonly undertaken by women.69 Hoch’s study of Petrovskoe in Tambov province notes that teams of husband and wife worked the fields, to fulfil the lord’s farming operations during the short Russian summer, which required harvesting and ploughing at the same time. Women harvested rye, winter wheat and oats with sickles, while men harvested other spring cereals with scythes. While women collected the grain and transported it off the field to the threshing floor, men started to plough and sow next year’s rye crop. To maximize the output of the estate, the manor and the bailiff encouraged early marriage, and new working teams were formed by couples who married at the age of 18 or 19.70 Accounts of women’s work from this part of Europe not only contradict the assumption that women were incapable of heavy field work, they also demonstrate starkly how women’s contribution to the agricultural workforce failed to correlate with status or power within households or village society. Ogilvie demonstrates very low proportions of women heading households under the regime of serfdom in Bohemia between 1591 and 1722. This was a consequence of women’s lack of power within village society, which allowed male peasants to override women’s requests to run their farms without men. Widowed women were forced to remarry quickly or give up their farms, pressured by male relatives and village leaders, backed up by manorial authorities.71

67 68

69 70 71

Heide Wunder, He Is the Sun, She Is the Moon: Women in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 65, quoting from a 1790 estate register. Rose L. Glickman, ‘Women and the peasant commune’, in Roger Bartlett (ed.), Land Commune and Peasant Community in Russia: Communal Forms in Imperial and Early Soviet Society (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 321–38, 321–22. Dating from 1898 and 1900: Christine D. Worobec, Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the Post-Emancipation Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 118, 178. Steven L. Hoch, ‘Serfs in Imperial Russia: Demographic Insights’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 13 (1982), 221–46, 244–45. Sheilagh Ogilvie and Jeremy Edwards, ‘Women and the “second serfdom”: Evidence from early modern Bohemia’, Journal of Economic History 60:4 (2000), 961–94, especially 979–85.

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Western Germany In parts of Germany not subject to serfdom, the gender division of labour is described in terms similar to northern France and England. Limberger writes that ‘generally, the cultivation of the fields was the task of the man, while cooking, gardening, and taking care of the children were the classic task of the woman. Harvesting and haying were rather tasks the family members carried out together’.72 Sabean’s study of Neckarhausen in south-west Germany also found that, in the eighteenth century, ‘women were not involved very substantially in field crop production, they did not have much to say about marketing such crops, and their work routine went by without much comment from men’.73 However, he argues that this changed in the late-eighteenth century, with the introduction of improved grasses (allowing cattle to be stall fed) and of root crops on the arable fields. Women took charge of cutting fodder to feed the cattle, carrying it some distance from fields to farms bundled on their heads. The considerable labour of planting and hoeing root crops was also a female task.74 Ogilvie disputes the novelty of these patterns of work in her more thorough examination of work in the nearby communities of Wildberg and Ebhausen from 1646 to 1800.75 She found that agriculture made up a significant proportion of women’s work and that women participated in all types of agricultural work, with no particular specialization of women in pastoral or arable agriculture.76 Women cut grass and carried heavy loads of hay;77 they did all types of fieldwork, including occasional ploughing.78 Female servants did a higher proportion of agricultural work (40 per cent of their recorded work tasks) than married women (20 per cent of recorded work tasks) but in both cases the contribution was significant.79 It is also revealing that never-married and widowed women were able to run farms on their own without male labour.80 North Sea Region (the Low Countries, Northern France, England) In the most urbanized region of northern Europe only 50 per cent of the male labour force worked in agriculture.81 Agriculture was highly commercialized, 72

73 74 76 78 80 81

Michael Limberger, ‘North-west Germany, 1000–1750’, in Eric Vanhaute, Isabelle Devos and Thijs Lambrecht (eds.), Rural Economy and Society in North-Western Europe: Making a Living: Family, Income and Labour, 500–2000 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 219. David Warren Sabean, Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 25. 75 Sabean, Property, Production, and Family, 148–51. Ogilvie, Bitter Living, 121, 126. 77 Ogilvie, Bitter Living, 31, 119–21, 143–45. Ogilvie, Bitter Living, 147, 294. 79 Ogilvie, Bitter Living, 119, 200. Ogilvie, Bitter Living, 123, 141. Ogilvie, Bitter Living, 249, 287. Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 195; Leigh Shaw-Taylor and E. A. Wrigley, ‘Occupational structure and population

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with large grain-producing farms in northern France and eastern and midland England, as well as farms producing dairy products, meat, vegetables and industrial crops, particularly in the Low Countries and on the outskirts of cities. Across this region a similar gender division of labour in agriculture is reported. Married women and female servants ran dairies, raised poultry and used gardens to grow vegetables. Female day labourers were employed to weed grain crops in the early summer. Women took part in hay making and the grain harvest: sometimes harvesting with a sickle or binding the cut corn into sheaves.82 The best evidence survives for the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Given that women’s participation seems to have declined over time as farm size and commercialization increased, the widespread evidence of women’s agricultural work at this late date is important to note. For the Groningen region of the Netherlands during the early-nineteenth century, van Nederveen Meerkerk and Paping found that female agricultural servants were common, with an average of 1.1 farm maids per farm in 1829 (compared to 1.5 male farm hands). Farm accounts reveal large groups of female day labourers employed between April and June to weed crops, and women working in the harvest binding sheaves. On four large farms with accounts dating from 1773 to 1843 women provided between 8 and 34 per cent of days worked by labourers.83 In eighteenth-century Zeeland, large arable farms made use of married women’s labour. Labourers’ wives provided a seasonal agricultural workforce while the wives of large farmers ran small dairies and tended orchards and vegetable gardens to provide themselves with an independent source of income.84 In the Caux region of Normandy in France, arable agriculture was combined with producing cotton and linen cloth. Here women spun yarn all year round for their main income, but also raised vegetables and flax, cared for livestock

82

83

84

change’, in Roderick Floud, Jane Humphries and Paul Johnson (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, vol. 1 1700–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 53–88, 59. Phillipp Schofield and Jane Whittle, ‘Britain: 1000–1750’, in Eric Vanhaute, Isabelle Devos and Thijs Lambrecht (eds.), Rural Economy and Society in North-Western Europe: Making a Living: Family, Income and Labour, 500–2000 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 47–70, 53–54; Gérard Béaur and Laurent Feller, ‘Northern France, 1000–1750’, in Eric Vanhaute, Isabelle Devos and Thijs Lambrecht (eds.), Rural Economy and Society in North-Western Europe: Making a Living: Family, Income and Labour, 500–2000 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 99–126, 109–10; Isabel Devos, Thijs Lambrecht and Richard Paping, ‘The Low Countries, 1000–1750’, in Eric Vanhaute, Isabelle Devos and Thijs Lambrecht (eds.), Rural Economy and Society in North-Western Europe: Making a Living: Family, Income and Labour, 500–2000 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 157–84, 168. Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk and Richard Paping, ‘Beyond the census: Reconstructing Dutch women’s labour force participation in agriculture in the Netherlands, ca.1830–1910’, History of the Family 19 (2014), 447–68, 461–63. Piet van Cruyningen, ‘Female labour in agriculture in Zeeland in the eighteenth century’, Tijdschrift voor sociale en economische geschiedenis 2 (2005), 43–59.

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and provided an essential part of the harvest workforce. Gullickson describes how ‘men, women and children poured into the fields in late July for six weeks of work cutting, gathering, binding, and transporting the grain to the peasants’ barns’.85 Verdon also emphasizes the seasonal nature of women’s employment as day labourers in England, where they were most likely to be employed in weeding, hay making and harvesting in spring and summer.86 Farm service, for both men and women, was in decline in late-eighteenth century England, but persisted on smaller farms in the west and north of the country.87 There is scattered evidence for earlier periods. Robert Loder ran a large farm of around 60 hectares of arable and 40 hectares of pasture in central southern England in the early seventeenth century. His most profitable crop was barley which he grew and malted for the London brewing trade. Loder employed five farm servants, three men and two women, as well as a male shepherd to care for his sheep flock, each year between 1610 and 1620. His female servants’ main responsibility on the farm was malting barley, but they also made hay, helped in the harvest, milked cows, picked fruit and travelled to market to sell cherries and apples.88 Henry Best farmed in East Yorkshire in the same period. With a farm of over 145 hectares of arable and 40 hectares of pasture, he employed more servants: eight men and two women, as well as two full-time male workers to care for his sheep and beef cattle. The male servants ploughed, sowed crops, mowed hay, loaded and drove carts and took produce to market. The female servants milked the 14 cows and were responsible for washing, brewing and baking – helping to care for the male workforce.89 Best employed other labourers paid by the day or task to wash and shear sheep, harvest hay, corn and peas and to thresh corn. His detailed descriptions make it clear that women were employed in both the hay and corn harvest.90 Lambrecht shows that the employment of servants in farming households was common in sixteenth-century Flanders. In Watervliet, a village of large farms in the polder region, 20 per cent of households employed servants in 1544, and 23 out of 56 servants listed were female. In contrast in Beveren, a larger village of smaller family farms outside Antwerp, 13 per cent of households had servants and half of the 80 servants listed were female.91 85 86 88

89 90 91

Gay L. Gullickson, Spinners and Weavers of Auffay: Rural Industry and the Sexual Division of Labor in a French Village, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 31. 87 Verdon, Rural Women Workers, 55–61. Verdon, Rural Women Workers, 77–83. Jane Whittle, ‘Servants in rural England, c.1450–1650: Hired work as a means of accumulating wealth and skills before marriage’, in Maria Ågren and Amy Louise Erickson (eds.), The Marital Economy in Scandinavia and Britain 1400–1900 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 89–107, 92–93. Whittle, ‘Servants in rural England’, 91–92. Roberts, ‘Sickles and scythes’, 9–10; Woodward (ed.), Henry Best, 34–39 (haymaking), 45–62 (grain harvest). Lambrecht, ‘Institution of service’, 40.

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In this highly commercialized part of Europe, as elsewhere, the rural landscape was a patchwork of different farms types. Areas dominated by arable or livestock farming, or with large or small farms lay side by side and existed in symbiotic relationships. Areas of rural industry were scattered throughout, providing an alternative source of income, particularly from hand spinning – almost always a female occupation. Further, the rural economy was profoundly affected by the presence of large cities, which offered not only a market for agricultural produce, but also employment for rural migrants. Add economic change over time to this picture and it is evident that, while common patterns existed in the types of work available (or considered suitable) for women, the range of opportunities available to particular women at particular times and places varied significantly. Two Case Studies The variety of agricultural systems and gendered work patterns within Europe is best illustrated through detailed case studies. This allows the range of work tasks undertaken by rural households to be appreciated, as well as the wider economic context in which these households existed. Here we present the two contrasting agricultural systems of Norway and south-west England. In Norway, subsistence agriculture, undertaken by women, was combined with men’s work in other areas of the economy. In England, agriculture was highly commercialized and men did more agricultural work than women. Nonetheless, women were still an essential part of the agricultural workforce. Norway Neither ‘plough agriculture’ nor ‘male-dominated agriculture’ grasps the essence of the early modern Norwegian household economy. If economists seriously want to study causality rather than correlation they should as a first step acknowledge that early modern households relied on women’s physical strength, trustworthiness and responsibility and not label these as male assets. Obviously, studies such as those by Alesina et al. are not based on sources that historians use to research men’s and women’s work. Norwegian historians have used court records, accounts and tax lists as well as traces of material culture to explain how households used a gender division of work to eke out a living in Europe’s high north.92 Agriculture was a precarious form of survival in early modern Norway. The yield of oats and barley was only 1:5, and harvest was once a year. The 90 per 92

Ann Kristin Klausen, Helgelands historie, Band 3 1537–1800 (Mosjøen: Helgeland historielag, 2011), 63–84.

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cent of the population who lived in the countryside managed to produce two thirds of the grain needed. The remaining third had to be imported and, since the Middle Ages, Norway had relied on the grain trade of northern Europe. Until 1550 mainly the Hansa imported grain from the Baltic in exchange for stock fish and other products. Later, Danish, Dutch and British merchants traded grain from Denmark and the Baltic. Early modern Norway exported stock fish, timber, deal,93 copper and iron to pay for import of grain. The producers of all these export goods were farmers who did this work during the winter and when agricultural labour was not needed. The gender division of labour at household level made this way of making a living possible. This household combination of many trades (mangesysleriet) is well known from studies of early modern household economy all over Europe. The many combinations in Sweden are demonstrated in research based on the verboriented method.94 The household combination of trades relied on the hard work of all household members, and creativity to find new ways of making a living and to balance the workload throughout the year. The Norwegian fisher/farmer households along the coast north of Trondheim provide a good illustration: in January almost all men and boys from the communities, five to six to each open boat, sailed and rowed 500 km north to the fishing grounds in Lofoten, fished for about six weeks, prepared and hung up the fish for drying, and then returned home in March. In May/June some of the men sailed north with bigger ships to collect the dried fish and then travelled to Bergen (2,000 km away) with the stock fish to be sold to merchants, before returning back home again (1,500 km) with the grain they had purchased. In between these journeys they took part in working the fields and collecting fodder. Arable agriculture and raising livestock in this part of Norway were mainly women’s work and mainly for direct subsistence needs. The combination of agriculture, livestock, commercial fishing and home-fishing for subsistence relied on the hard experience that one of these strands of livelihood could fail, but seldom all. And if the worst should happen – that the men did not return from the sea – the household could survive on the farm.95 Commercial cod-fishing during summer along the southern coast of Norway remained undeveloped due to lack of salt to preserve cod; the salt was used for commercial herring conservation. But in the eighteenth century, merchants solved the salt problem and commercial cod-fishing during the summer became possible. In the north, men were fishing for herring, coalfish, halibut, cod and ling during summer. As a consequence, arable agriculture and livestock farming relied even more heavily on women, who in some districts were 93 95

94 Planks of sawn pine timber. Ågren (ed.), Making a Living. Arnved Nedkvitne, ‘Mens Bønderne seilte og Jægterne for’: Nordnorsk og vestnorsk kystøkonomi 1500–1730 (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1988), 592.

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also engaged in preserving clip fish and salting cod and herring. In all fishing communities the making and preparation of textiles and food for the long fishing-journeys was women’s work. All resources depended on the season and had to be allocated at the right time. Harvesting and collecting eggs and down happened at the same time as the important coalfish and herring fishing took place. In the high north, seasons also meant the shift between light and lack of light: midnight sun lasted from May to July and then the Polar night from November to January. Two classic, much quoted Norwegian studies for the nineteenth century illustrate the work year that emerged in the eighteenth century for the fishing/farmer households when men were fishing all year round and women did much of the farm work (see Table 3.1). The adaptation of Norwegian pre-industrial households to international trade relied on the effective use of all natural resources and all household members as workforce. As well as fish-products from the coastal areas, fur and berries were exported. From the inland regions in eastern and southern Norway timber was exported to England, Scotland and the Netherlands and mineral products came from copper mines, ironworks and silver mines. The workforce in forestry and the transport of minerals was made up of male farmers who used the low season in agriculture to participate. Miners in some parts of the Table 3.1. Annual work routines in nineteenth-century Norway Troms, Karlsøy, Nineteenth Centurya Months

Fishing

Farm

January–April April–May June July–August September–October November–December

Lofoten (cod) Capelin Greenland shark Coalfish Herring

Feeding cattle with kelp and hay Spading, tilling field, sowing Cutting peat, making cod liver oil Harvesting, haymaking, collecting eggs and down Potato harvest Preparing food, equipment for fishing at Lofoten

Sogn og Fjordane, Nineteenth Centuryb Months

Fishing

Farm

January–April May June–July August–September October–December

Cod and herring To Bergen Coalfish Herring

Feeding cattle with kelp and hay Spade-tilling field, sowing Cutting peat Harvesting, haymaking Preparing food, equipment for winter fishing

Sources: a Håvard Dahl Bratrein, Drivandes kvinnfolk, om kvinner lønn og arbeid (Tromsø: Universitetetsforlaget, 1976), 23. b Karl Egil Johansen, Fiskarsoga for Sogn og Fjordane 1860–1980 (Bergen: Universitetetsforlaget, 1982), 58–73.

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country relied on a small farm (enabling them to survive when the mines were not working), while in other parts mining took the form of wage labour only, leaving workers exposed to market crises. Preindustrial livestock farming and arable agriculture were hard work. Only 3 per cent of land in Norway was suitable for arable farming and, during the early modern little ice age, cold and wet summers, hailstorms and early snow could ruin a harvest. However, grain was produced wherever possible. To make more out of small farms, households from the west coast in the eighteenth century started cultivating the soil with spades rather than ploughs. While very labour intensive, this gave a slightly higher yield. In some of these districts, potato was introduced, but was not in common use in Norway until the early nineteenth century. The combination of agriculture and livestock relied on transhumance. Scarcity of farmland required extensive use of all other types of land and resources for fodder. Cattle, sheep and goats were taken up to the mountains before Midsummer Eve (23 June). During the summer any household members available, male and female, took part in haymaking, fodder collection and harvest close to the farmhouse; while women, often daughters, trusted servant maids or wives, took care of the animals and produced butter and cheese on summer farms at 1,000 m above sea level. Small farms meant even more work to make a living. Fodder had to be carried a long distance and on the many small farms this was done without horses. For the emerging class of cottars who rented small plots of land from farmers, the workload was even heavier. They had to work both the farmer’s land as well as their own plots during the few summer weeks. The amount of work varied and was less in the western regions. An account book from one big farm in eastern Norway relates the heavy work of cottar women: in addition to the summer work in the fields and subsequent harvest, they had to spin and weave for the farmer and, when cheap foreign cotton undercut homemade flax, the cottar women were ordered to dig ditches in the heavy clay fields.96 The state government added to the households’ burdens. Norway was under Danish rule until 1814 and the state took about 10 per cent of production in taxes and fees. In addition, the state took the workforce. Half of all young men under 30 were under military command, in the army or navy. The effect of this burden varied with war and peace. The long seventeenth century was the hardest: six wars between Sweden and Denmark in the period 1563–1720 were followed by a long peace period for Denmark–Norway until 1807. Many civil servants under Danish rule noticed the Norwegian gender division of labour and described it in eighteenth-century periodicals and reports. From Ørlandet at the coast of Mid-Norway the official Christen Pram wrote in 1804 in his report to the Department of Commerce in Copenhagen: 96

Anna Tranberg, ‘“Ledighed taales ikke”: Plassfamilier på gardsarbeid’, Historisk Tidsskrift 69 (1990), 512–36.

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‘The men do little and unwilling to do rural work, that becomes women’s work, while the men fish and tend their fishing equipment and boats.’97 The vicar of Lofoten, Erik Andreas Colban, reported much the same in his topography Forsøg til en beskrivelse over Lofoden og Vesteraalens Fogderi (Trondheim 1818). It is therefore not surprising that the 1820s tax-committee concluded without any hesitation that the workforce required at farms along the northern coast was 0.1 of a man’s work year and 1.0 of a woman’s. The committee also stipulated this as the norm. The committee based their calculation on the amount of arable land, cattle and horses. Lack of arable land and horses on the northern farms explains in part why the male workforce was so low. For inland farms in southern Norway with more arable land, more cattle and horses, the committee stipulated a workforce of three male and three female work years.98 The perspective of gendered household work has dominated studies of the early modern Norwegian economy.99 Studies of the gender division of labour and households’ allocation of time and resources have contributed to a better understanding of the whole economy. Yet the modernization perspective dominates the volumes on the early modern period and the nineteenth century in the Norwegian Agrarian History (2002).100 Compared to modern agriculture methods, neither low-yielding small cows nor spade-tilled smallholdings holds any historical interest. In these volumes, female-dominated farming is devalued in much the same way as civil servants devalued it in the eighteenth century. The lack of gender perspective leads to narratives about men’s dilemmas in choosing farming or fishing, neglecting the evidence of the household’s division of work. Women in the fields are mentioned only as peculiarities. For instance, Lunden relates how, because the plough could not turn in small fields, women had to carry the plough round ‘to spare the horse’.101 A closer look shows that the source for this passage is an anecdotal note from the nineteenth century which records that the plough driver might have with him ‘a man or a woman’ to carry the light plough round at the end of the field: the point being made was that ploughs were ‘not heavier’ in those days.102

97 98 99

100 101 102

Gerd Mordt, Christen Prams rapporter fra Norge (Oslo: Kildeutgivelser fra Riksarkivet, 2019), 199. See also 203. Travel reports to the Department of Commerce in Copenhagen in 1804. Stein Tveite, ‘Kvinner i norsk bondesamfunn og bondenæring’, Jord og gjerning. Årbok for norsk landbruksmuseum (Oslo: Landbruksforlaget, 1988). Tranberg, ‘Ledighed taales ikke’; Tveite, ‘Kvinner i norsk bondesamfunn og bondenæring’; Ståle Dyrvik, Anders Bjarne Fossen, Edgar Hovland and Stein Tveite, Norsk økonomisk historie, Band 1 1500–1800 (Oslo: Universitetetsforlaget, 1979); Sølvi Sogner, Far sjøl i stua og familien hans (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1990). Norsk landbrukshistorie, Band 2 and 3 (Oslo: Det Norske Samlaget, 2002). Kåre Lunden, Norsk landbrukshistorie, Band 2 (Oslo: Det Norske Samlaget, 2002), 164. Valen-Sendstad, Norske landbruksredskaper.

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South-West England South-west England had an estimated population of around 850,000 in 1600.103 Both Snell and Sharpe have argued that the south-west had particularly favourable employment prospects for women in the early modern period. Cloth was produced for international markets in all of the counties except Cornwall and Dorset, providing plentiful employment for women in spinning; and there were specialist textile industries such as lace-making in east Devon, which was dominated by women.104 The western portion of this region was dominated by small pastoral farms. However, the region encompassed a great deal of variety. Farming types ranged from cattle and sheep rearing in the uplands of Devon and Cornwall, stock fattening in the Somerset Levels and dairying in east Devon, west Dorset and north-west Wiltshire, to arable farming in the clay vales of Devon and Somerset and sheep-corn farming in the chalk lands of Dorset, Wiltshire and Hampshire.105 Mid-nineteenth-century Parliamentary reports offer detailed descriptions of women being employed as day labourers in arable agriculture in all the south-western counties.106 To explore early modern agriculture, two main sources are used here. First, household and farm accounts kept by members of the gentry and wealthy farmers provide evidence of wage labour. Secondly, incidental and contextual evidence from witness statements and confessions in various courts provide evidence of work tasks carried out by a broad cross-section of the population, including unpaid labour and work on small family farms.107 Wage accounts from south-west England have been studied by Speechley, Dudley and Sharpe. Speechley analysed nine sets of farm accounts from Somerset dating from 1682 to 1871; Dudley three sets of household accounts from Devon, Somerset and Hampshire dating from 1644 to 1700; while Sharpe looked at two sets of 103

104

105

106 107

Defined here as the counties of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Hampshire, Somerset and Wiltshire; county population estimates from S. Broadberry, B. M. S. Campbell, A. Klein, M. Overton and B. van Leeuwen, British Economic Growth 1270–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 25. Pamela Sharpe, Population and Society in an East Devon Parish: Reproducing Colyton, 1540–1840 (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2002), 93; Pamela Sharpe, ‘Lace and place: Women’s business in occupational communities in England, 1550–1950’, Women’s History Review 19 (2010), 283–306. Joan Thirsk, England’s Agricultural Regions and Agrarian History, 1500–1750 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), especially 28–29; Avice R. Wilson, Forgotten Harvest: The Story of Cheesemaking in Wiltshire (Calne: Avice Wilson, 1995); Patricia Croot, The World of the Small Farmer: Tenure, Profit and Politics in the Early Modern Somerset Levels (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2017); Speechley, ‘Female and child’, 50–55. Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (London: Frank Cass, 1969), 90–91; Verdon, Rural Women Workers, 55–59. Evidence was taken from quarter sessions (county level criminal courts) examinations, church court depositions and coroners’ reports dating from 1500 to 1700. For more details see Whittle and Hailwood, ‘Gender division of labour’.

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accounts from Cornwall (1673–1714) and Devon (1790s).108 Speechley found that women undertook 20 per cent of days worked by day labourers on the Somerset farms she examined but undertook a wide range of tasks.109 Dudley’s findings were almost identical, with payments to female workers accounting for 20 per cent of day and task wages paid.110 Women’s wages were low. Both Speechley and Dudley found that women’s wages were on average half those paid to men.111 Witness statements from courts were used to construct a dataset of 4,300 work tasks, where each task was specified and carried out by a particular person. In total, 29 per cent of work tasks recorded were undertaken by women. Analysis showed that the low proportion of women’s work tasks was due to courts preferring male witnesses and the fact that both men and women were more likely to describe work tasks carried out by members of the same gender. Given that all forms of work were recorded, including care work and housework, and no historical evidence supports the idea that women had more leisure than men, an adjusted figure was calculated and is provided as well as the raw data in the following discussion. The adjusted figure assumes that 50 per cent of the total work tasks recorded were undertaken by women and thus multiplies the number of female work tasks recorded by 2.41. The adjusted figures are a more accurate reflection of women’s participation in work tasks than the unadjusted figures, which mirror the prejudices of the early modern legal system.112 A total of 1,077 work tasks related to agriculture and forestry were recorded, of which 19 per cent (raw totals) or 37 per cent (adjusted totals) were carried out by women. Tasks involving agriculture and land management made up 21 per cent of work tasks carried out by women, the same proportion as housework. These were the two most common categories of work undertaken by women, followed by buying and selling (18 per cent), care work (11 per cent) and craft production (9 per cent).113 Tables 3.2 and 3.3 show the types of agricultural tasks undertaken by men and women in south-west England recorded in the dataset, divided into arable and pastoral tasks. Women were engaged in a wide range of tasks but a distinct gender division of labour is 108

109 110 111 112 113

Speechley, ‘Female and child’; Imogene Dudley, ‘Evidence of women’s waged work from household accounts 1644–1700: Three case studies from Devon, Somerset and Hampshire’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Exeter, (2020); Pamela Sharpe, ‘Time and wages of West Country workfolks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, Local Population Studies 55 (1995), 66–68. Speechley, ‘Female and child’, 57. On particular farms the proportion of women’s labour varied from 1 per cent to 42 per cent. Dudley, ‘Women’s waged work’, 32. Speechley, ‘Female and child’, 116; Dudley ‘Women’s waged work’, 164–67. For more on the methodology see Whittle and Hailwood, ‘Gender division of labour’, 11–13. Whittle and Hailwood, ‘Gender division of labour’, 12, 15.

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Table 3.2. Arable agriculture, south-west England, 1500–1700 Total

Male

Female

Female (%)

Female adj.

Female (%) adj.

Prepare ground Digging marl/earth Sowing Weeding Grain harvest Other field work Threshing Winnowing

103 13 14 14 181 12 42 16

96 11 9 1 158 10 40 4

7 2 5 13 23 2 2 12

6.8 15.4 35.7 92.9 12.7 16.7 4.8 75.0

17 5 12 31 55 5 5 29

15.0 31.3 57.1 96.9 25.8 33.3 11.1 87.9

Total

395

329

66

16.7

159

32.6

Table 3.3. Pastoral agriculture, south-west England, 1500–1700 Total Male Female Female (%) Female adj. Female (%) adj. Milking Cattle: other Horses Sheep: keeping Sheep: shearing Sheep: marking Sheep: other Pigs Hay harvest Providing fodder Dairying

56 46 28 44 47 23 25 5 71 4 7

3 40 22 44 36 22 21 2 57 4 0

53 6 6 0 11 1 4 3 14 0 7

94.6 13.0 21.4 0.0 23.4 4.3 16.0 60.0 19.7 0.0 100.0

128 14 14 0 27 2 10 7 34 0 17

97.7 25.9 38.9 0.0 42.9 8.3 32.3 77.8 37.4 0.0 100.0

Total 356 Total w/o milk and dairy 293

251 248

105 45

29.5 15.3

253 108

50.2 30.3

nonetheless visible. In arable agriculture women dominated weeding and winnowing and made up a significant proportion of those sowing crops. They made up around a third of those digging and doing ‘other field work’ but were a smaller proportion of those carrying out the three most common tasks: preparing the ground (mostly ploughing), harvesting and threshing. Nonetheless, because the grain harvest required so much labour, this was also

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the most common agricultural task undertaken by women. In pastoral agriculture the division between men’s and women’s work was more distinct. Women did all the dairying and almost all of the milking; they commonly worked as sheep shearers, in the hay harvest and in care of horses. They also cared for sheep and cattle but never worked as shepherds. Smith, in a study of late sixteenth-century agricultural labour in eastern England, argued that ‘men’s and women’s work was “sexually exclusive”’: men and women did completely different tasks.114 Tables 3.2 and 3.3 show little evidence of gender exclusivity. Only a few tasks were exclusive to women or men and a few were shared roughly equally but most commonly tasks were done mainly by women or men. This is illustrated by looking in turn at the various tasks that made up arable and pastoral agriculture. Most arable land was prepared for crops by ploughing and most ploughing was done by men. However, it was not unknown for women to plough. In a 1551 tithe case from the church courts, Margaret Parsons of Western Zoyland in Somerset stated that she ‘being then servant . . . did both help to plough . . . & sow . . . with barley . . . [and] to reap the said corn’ in a seven acre field.115 However, she is the only example of a woman ploughing in the dataset. More commonly, women participated in other activities that prepared the soil for crops. Pinchbeck notes that ‘from early times’ women had worked at ‘todding’ (turning sods that had been pared and burnt) on waste ground that was being brought into cultivation.116 In two different cases from late sixteenthcentury Devon women were recorded ‘burning beat’ and ‘righting beat’ (‘beat’ being rough sod from heathland with vegetation attached), which appears to be a similar form of work.117 Women were paid for ‘beating’ at Antony in Cornwall in the seventeenth century, which is surely the same process.118 Women also prepared heavy clay soil for sowing by ‘balling’ or ‘clotting’ lumps of earth into smaller pieces. A Somerset woman was working ‘balling’ barley land in 1584 when she agreed to marry her fellow worker.119 Similarly female labourers were paid for ‘clotting’ at Leyhill in Devon in the mid-seventeenth century.120 Women were actively involved in sowing crops. Pinchbeck thought that women’s work sowing or ‘setting’ peas and beans was an innovation of the late-eighteenth century but earlier evidence also exists.121 In 1659, a married 114 115 117 118 119 120

A. Hassell Smith, ‘Labourers in late sixteenth-century England: A case study from north Norfolk [Part II]’, Continuity and Change 4 (1989), 367–94, 377. 116 Somerset Record Office, D/D/Cd/6, pp. 236–38. Pinchbeck, Women Workers, 53. Devon Heritage Centre: Chanter 859, fol. 39r–39v. (Chudleigh, 1575); Chanter 864, fol. 12v– 12a.r (North Petherwin, 1593). Sharpe, ‘Time and wages’, 66. Somerset Record Office, D/D/Cd/20, fol. 44r–44v (Brean, 1584). 121 Dudley, ‘Women’s waged work’, 105, 158. Pinchbeck, Women Workers, 60.

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woman from Dorset worked alone, planting beans in a field; while at Rockbeare in Devon in 1661 a widow was employed for wages to ‘set peas in the ground’.122 Dudley finds women being paid to set beans in seventeenthcentury Devon and Hampshire.123 Women also sowed grain: two women were among a family group who were sowing corn in a field at Shute in Devon in 1672, just as Margaret Parsons had done in mid sixteenth-century Somerset.124 Weeding arable crops had been a common form of women’s agricultural work in England since the medieval period.125 Female weeders appear commonly in wage accounts and frequently among the work tasks in the database. Dudley found weeding made up 34 per cent of the days worked by female labourers at Herriard Park in Hampshire in the late seventeenth century and it was the most commonly specified farm task undertaken by women at Leyhill in Devon and Barrow Court near Bristol.126 Female weeders typically worked in groups and normally on other people’s land, suggesting this was work women often undertook for wages. For instance, court cases record five women working with ‘diverse others’ at Broadclyst in Devon in 1617; three women weeding fields belonging to the father of one of them at Instow in Devon in 1633; and three women weeding together at Bradford on Tone in Somerset in 1676.127 Evidence from south-west England confirms that only men mowed with a scythe, but that reaping with a sickle was a mixed activity.128 The adjusted figures in Table 3.2 show that women made up 35 per cent of those reaping with a sickle, and only 26 per cent of those undertaking tasks in the grain harvest more generally. This indicates that, even when the sickle was used, women did not do the majority of harvest work in south-west England in this period. The final arable farming process in which women had a strong presence was winnowing – separating the grain and chaff after it had been threshed. Winnowing seems to have typically been done alone or in pairs, often in the street. Cases of women winnowing are found from all over the region, including one case from 1675 of a newly-married Somerset woman winnowing to pay off a seven-shilling debt incurred by purchasing a bed.129

122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129

Somerset Record Office: Q/SR/98 (Beaminster (Dorset), 1659); Devon Heritage Centre: Chanter 868 (Rockbeare, 1661). Dudley, ‘Women’s waged work’, 93–94, 158. Devon Heritage Centre: Chanter 875 fols. 153v–158v (Shute, 1672). Pinchbeck, Women Workers, 61. The Luttrell Psalter, an illuminated manuscript dated 1320–40, has an illustration of women weeding crops. Dudley, ‘Women’s waged work’, 93, 105, 111. Devon Heritage Centre: Chanter 867 (Broadclyst, 1617); Chanter 866 (Instow, 1633); Somerset Record Office: D/D/Col/97, fols. 66–76v (Bradford-on-Tone, 1676). Roberts, ‘Sickles and scythes’. Somerset Record Office: D/D/Cd/106, fols. 70–71v (Nailsea, 1675).

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Turning to pastoral agriculture we find that milking and dairying were dominated by women.130 In this period there was no male equivalent of a dairymaid – the female servant employed on most large farms to milk and make cheese. The court records dataset recorded many instances of milking, of which only three related to men: all these were ambiguous. Two men were described as accompanying women to and from milking, making it unclear who actually did the work, while in 1670 William Ridwood of West Pennard in Somerset was described as living ‘by his labour and doth milk two cows’. It is possible this was a description of his household economy rather than his actual work activity.131 No men were described as making butter or cheese. This was an activity in which women could have some independence: two different women in early seventeenth-century Somerset were described as running dairies that were some distance from the main farm, provided with their own accommodation.132 It is less clear the extent to which women’s responsibility stretched into caring for cattle and other livestock in the pastoral economy. Wage accounts rarely record women engaged in this type of work: in the three sets of household accounts studied by Dudley she found that between 91 and 97 per cent of the agricultural tasks performed by women as day labourers concerned field work and not care of livestock.133 The court case dataset contains a handful of cases of women turning cattle out into fields, feeding cattle, and droving cattle, but they are greatly outnumbered by examples of men doing these tasks. A similar pattern is found with horses and sheep. While agricultural advice literature from the early modern period described the care of horses as a male task, women rode horses and are recorded catching and leading horses and cleaning out stables. There were no instances of women ‘keeping’ sheep (the female shepherds as imagined by Voigtlander and Voth), but women did drove and wash sheep. Women also worked as sheep-shearers: there were 11 instances of women shearing sheep from five different court cases, four from Devon and one from Somerset. Most of these women were described as married and all were working for other people. A tithe case from Devon recorded Anne Josse and Wilmota Smallridge who ‘did shear . . . yearly 50 sheep’ for one Westcott of Holcombe Burnelle, three years in a row from 1632 to 1634.134 There are scattered references to female sheep-shearers elsewhere in England: Goldberg cites it as a common employment for women 130 131 132 133 134

Deborah M. Valenze, ‘The art of women and the business of men: Women’s work and the dairy industry, c.1740–1840’, Past & Present 130 (1991), 142–69. Wiltshire and Swindon Heritage Centre: D1/42/30 (Potterne, 1615); Somerset Record Office: D/D/Cd/75 (Wembdon, 1632); D/D/Cd/93, fols. 119v–130, 140v–146 (West Pennard, 1670). Somerset Record Office: Q/SR/33 (Burnham, 1615); D/D/Cd/36 (Stenning, 1605). Dudley, ‘Women’s waged work’, 91, 105, 111. Devon Record Office, Chanter 866, pp. 22–23.

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in fifteenth-century Yorkshire, while Clark provides examples from early modern Sussex and Norfolk.135 The hay harvest that provided fodder for livestock was a mixed activity. Men mowed the hay crop while both women and men made hay (raking and turning hay to dry it in the fields). Along with weeding and harvesting corn, hay-making was one of three most common activities which women were paid for as day labourers; these three activities were also some of the most common forms of women’s agricultural work in the court case dataset, along with milking, winnowing, and sheep-shearing. Looking in detail at work tasks allows us to move beyond generalization about the gender division of labour. It becomes clear that some processes within both arable and pastoral agriculture were dominated either by women or men. Conclusion Historically, some farming systems which did not use the plough were dominated by women, such as those of sub-Saharan Africa.136 However, although women are only occasionally recorded using the plough, the presence of ‘plough agriculture’ in Europe did not lead to women being excluded from agricultural work and confined to the home as Alesina et al. argue. The examination of the gender division of labour in European agriculture in this chapter suggests five main reasons why this was the case. First, European agriculture was a mixed system in which any arable production using ploughs relied on animal husbandry to provide manure: farming never consisted only of ploughing. Secondly, European agriculture was highly varied: although grains were the staple crop, crops and livestock differed a great deal by region and required different forms of farming. Thirdly, women provided a significant proportion of agricultural labour. Fourthly, even within arable agriculture women commonly contributed to essential tasks such as sowing, weeding and harvesting crops. Finally, it should be noted that women did sometimes till the soil, using ploughs (which varied regionally in size and weight), and spades, as we have seen from the Norwegian case study. This chapter has explored the variety of agricultural systems and the roles of women and men within them. We have argued that mono-causal explanations cannot account for the wide range of gendered work patterns found within these systems. These ranged from the circumstances discussed in our two case studies where women dominated agriculture, as in Norway, or provided a 135

136

Goldberg, Women Work and Life-Cycle, 139, 244, 291, 296–97; Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London: Rouledge & Kegan Paul, 1982 [originally published 1919]), 62. Ester Boserup, Women’s Role in Economic Development (London: Earthscan, 1970), ch. 1.

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significant part of the workforce, as in south-west England. There were also regions where women did little agricultural work, as in eighteenth-century central Spain, as discussed by Carmen Sarasúa in Chapter 4. Women’s competence as farm managers and workers is demonstrated by their ability to run farms when men were absent working elsewhere or in military service or after their husband’s death.137 Even in regions where women on average did less agricultural work than men, as in England, the sheer quantity of work required for agricultural production meant that agricultural work made up an important part of women’s work repertoires. When early modern women living in the countryside were not agricultural workers this was typically because they were engaged in other forms of more profitable work, for instance textile production or petty marketing in the countryside. Most rural households could not afford to support adults who did not generate an income and even wealthier households in this period showed very little sign of adhering to an ideal of wives who did only unpaid housework and care-work. The gender division of labour in agriculture was not fixed but flexible and was adjusted to meet particular circumstances. Models proposed by historical economists based on an unchanging gender division of labour are historically inaccurate: they perpetuate myths without examining the historical evidence. Women formed a crucial part of Europe’s agricultural workforce throughout the pre-industrial period.

137

For women farming as widows, see Jane Whittle, ‘Enterprising widows and active wives: Women’s unpaid work in the household economy of early modern England’, The History of the Family 19 (2014), 283–300.

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4

Rural Manufactures Carmen Sarasúa

Introduction In the 1970s and 1980s, the literature on proto-industrialization showed the importance of rural manufacturing in pre-industrial Europe. Proto-industry scholars were not primarily interested in women’s work, even though rural industries had been part of the first studies of women’s work by women scholars such as Alice Clark’s Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, published in 1919. Clark had devoted a whole chapter to textiles, arguing that women’s work ‘was absolutely indispensable to the textile industries, for in all ages and in all countries, spinning has been a monopoly of women . . . [and] spinning forms the greater part of the labour in the production of hand-made textile fabrics’.1 Relying on contemporary sources, Clark identified two factors that explained why rural domestic production became women’s work. First, the absence of institutional restrictions against women’s work in the countryside, such as those imposed by the guilds in the towns: ‘The work of men and women alike was carried on chiefly at home, and thus the employment of married women and children was unimpeded; nor are there any signs of industrial jealousy between men and women’. Second, women’s much lower labour costs, as the manufacturer ‘could pay lower wages to the women who worked at home than to those who left their families in order to work on his premises’.2 Though well-known from the early twentieth century – and highlighted in important subsequent work by Thirsk – the economic relevance of rural domestic industries was only fully recognized when proto-industrialization theory was developed.3 Beginning with Mendels’s dissertation on the 1 2 3

Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982 [1919]), 93. Clark, Working Life, 95, 100. Joan Thirsk, ‘Industries in the countryside’, in F. J. Fisher (ed.), Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 70–88.

115

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Flemish linen industry, and then developed by Kriedte, Medick and Schlumbohm to explain the transition to capitalism, proto-industrialization was defined as the mass production of manufactures for export markets that took place in the European countryside.4 This rural manufacturing, it was argued, allowed cottager families to complement their income from agricultural labour and, consequently, to survive in larger numbers. Decades of research have led to the conclusion that most proto-industrial regions did not evolve into industrial zones. Nor has the assumed positive impact of rural industry on population growth been found in all cases. But by arguing that there was an increase in labour supply, the proto-industrial model shifted historians’ focus to labour, the neglected factor in traditional accounts of industrialization. ‘Interpretations of industrialization have traditionally focused on technology, capital, and entrepreneurship, and the institutions that enabled them to be deployed. Labour . . . was assigned a passive role, to be replaced progressively by machinery and capital.’5 And by focusing on the early modern economy, proto-industrial literature provided historians with new and valuable elements for understanding how ‘work before the factory’ was organized. Of particular importance for gender historians, this led to the development of a formal model of domestic production, in which household members were identified as workers – not merely producers of food and goods for household consumption. Scholarship on proto-industry would eventually transform some of the paradigms of economic history.6 It provided a new vision of peasant households and of their varied sources of income, which paved the way for Jan de Vries’s model of internal demand as the key to European economic growth before the industrialization process. Although the literature on proto-industry largely ignored women, it allowed an alternative story of rural manufactures to be told, one grounded on empirical evidence. This evidence, amassed by local studies since the 1970s, showed that women were in fact the central labour force in the manufacturing sector. 4

5 6

Franklin Mendels, ‘Proto-industrialization: The first phase of the industrialization process’, Journal of Economic History 32 (1972), 241–61. Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick and Jürgen Schlumbohm, Industrialization before Industrialization. Studies in Modern Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Gareth Austin and Kaoru Sugihara, ‘Introduction’, in Gareth Austin and Kaoru Sugihara (eds.), Labour-Intensive Industrialization in Global History (London: Routledge, 2013), 1–19, 4. Among other things, it undermined Labrousse’s theory of ‘the crisis of the old type’, according to which famines not only profoundly damaged the agricultural sector but also severely injured manufactures, because increases in the price of bread reduced the global propensity to consume, while the demand for non-foodstuffs fell. ‘In Mendels’ model, by contrast, rural proto-industry is left untouched by this vicious circle because the final markets are distant from the production area and from any agricultural crisis it may experience’, Carlo Marco Belfanti, ‘Rural manufactures and rural protoindustries in the “Italy of the Cities” from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century’, Continuity and Change 2 (1993), 253–80, especially 253.

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The renewed interest in the story of European proto-industry is particularly timely, given the current focus on pre-industrial occupational structure. Recent literature on long-term growth has defined structural change more in terms of employment than in terms of output, which has meant that the percentage of non-agricultural occupations is taken as proxy for economic modernization.7 This chapter has three objectives. The first section describes how rural manufactures have been interpreted by economic historians and how the literature has moved from conceptualizing the household as a unit of production to discussing the gender division of labour within it. The second section explores the role of women according to empirical studies of rural industry in modern Europe and what this implies for the narrative of structural change, economic growth and participation rates. The third section explains why this literature is significant for historians of gender and work and also how the work of feminist economists and historians have changed the proto-industrial model.8 This, in turn, allows me to suggest the extent to which women’s supply of labour spurred economic growth and structural change in preindustrial Europe. I conclude with suggesting how these insights should shape the direction of future research. This is not a call to ‘add women and stir’. What I argue in this chapter is that the interpretation of proto-industrialization – and particularly of the surplus labour resources that made it possible – would benefit from a systematic examination of the widespread, institutionalized gender division of labour, since the gender division of labour may well have been a key factor in accounting for diverse paths and intensities of industrialization. Taking the gender division of labour into account means considering at least three elements: (1) the relative numbers of women and men workers in different regions and industries, (2) gender gaps in skill, productivity, and wages and (3) the institutional framework regulating women’s access to skilled and paid work. A brief mention of sources will be helpful. The first wave of interest in proto-industry mostly generated case studies – analyses of peasant communities, their household composition and their members’ occupations, on the basis of baptism, marriage and burial records, as well as travellers’ accounts and other local documents. 7

8

Leigh Shaw-Taylor, ‘Diverse experiences: The geography of adult female employment in England and Wales and the 1851 census’, in Nigel Goose (ed.), Women’s Work in Industrial England: Regional and Local Perspectives (Hatfield: Local Population Studies, 2007), 29–50. And, more recently, the works by the European Network for the Comparative History of Population Geography and Occupational Structure (ENCHOS) led by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. Carmen Sarasúa, ‘Becoming mainstream? Placing women’s work in economic history’, in Enrica Asquer, Anna Bellavitis and Isabelle Chabot (eds.), Vingt-cinq ans après: les femmes au rendez-vous de l’Histoire (Rome: Collection de l’École Française de Rome, nº 561, 2019), 371–83.

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Fiscal and population records are the second major source. Books listing the occupations – and taxes on the income – of heads of households (at the parish level) allowed historians to move beyond local studies. Women were rarely listed as heads of households but, in some of these fiscal records and cadasters, householders did declare the occupations of all family members. In the second half of the eighteenth century, almost all European countries produced population censuses. Again, parish registers often failed to register women’s occupations, but archival evidence is now being identified that includes them. Finally, Enlightenment interest in mapping out ‘useful productions’ and promoting manufactures has provided historians with valuable collections of data on rural and urban manufactures – and women’s involvement in them. The Dictionnaire universel du commerce, by Jacques Savary des Brûlons (Paris, 1723–30), the Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, by Malachy Postlethwayt (London, 1751–55), Dell’Agricoltura, dell’Arti e del comercio, by Antonio Zanon (Venezia, 1765) and the 45 volumes of the Memorias políticas y económicas sobre los frutos, comercio, fábricas y minas de España, by Eugenio Larruga (Madrid, 1792), are examples of these rich resources, all of which identify women and children as the central labour force of the manufacturing sector. Proto-industry and Industriousness: Rural Manufactures and the Role of Women’s Work Proto-industry was first defined as a stage in the process by which rural manufactures eventually gave way to an industrialization process. Terms like ‘rural’, ‘cottage’ and ‘domestic industries’ were more neutral, without implying a specific evolutionary path. Proto-industrial literature stressed the regional nature of the industrialization process and moved the focus from manufactures in urban centres, with guilds, to manufactures in the countryside, where there were no guilds. The starting point was the discovery of demographic growth through earlier marriages and increased fertility and the fact that such growth did not only occur in urban centres, but in the countryside as well.9 The central fact was what Kriedte called ‘the promotion, by the merchant capitalists, of manufacturing in the countryside and the mobilization of the underemployed rural labour force for this purpose’.10 It is important to note 9

10

A further reason for this demographic growth, not sufficiently considered by the literature of the time, was that local demand for labour acted as a disincentive to move to the city, in other words, the lack of migratory flows. See Chapter 6. Kriedte, Medick and Schlumbohm, Industrialization before Industrialization, 12. A further consequence of the model was to move the debate on modern economic growth outside the United Kingdom, laying the foundations for a comprehensive debate that considers and contrasts different regional developments.

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that, in the first works on proto-industry, workers were usually presented as agricultural workers, who were seasonally unemployed. In economic terms, the incentive for these peasants to work in seasonal manufactures was their low or even zero opportunity cost during the off-season.11 This vision of rural manufactures – peasant households combining their agricultural work with non-agricultural activities – is linked to the idea of the rural household as a unit. As described for the case of Poland, ‘[p]roduction was based upon the work of the families of weaver-farmers, who concentrated in their hands all the stages of the productive process’.12 However, as new research would show, the combination of agricultural work with manufacturing work – that is, the development of manufacturing as a seasonal activity complementary to farming – was only possible when the manufactured items were for household consumption or exchange in local markets. The intense commercial networks of the eighteenth century were in fact highly capitalized, managed by urban merchant associations, and served urban and colonial markets. They functioned year-round. They imposed an intense work rhythm, the specialization of labour, and an increasingly clear separation of farm and workshop. Whatever the limitations of this early proto-industry model, it took some crucial first steps: defining the rural household as a productive unit, acknowledging that manufactures were for the market and not for household consumption and identifying women and children as workers. It transformed our vision of the rural economy in general and of peasant women in particular. As Engermen has observed, ‘while adult male labor was predominant in agricultural work, the production of goods in the household provided greater opportunities for women and children to add to household income’.13 A more recent development in explanations of the pre-industrial economy has been the concept of an ‘industrious revolution’. According to Jan de Vries, the eighteenth-century European economy went through consumer and industrious revolutions, in which growing demand for market goods (caused by rising per-capita income and changing individual preferences and tastes) motivated households to re-allocate time from leisure and household

11

12

13

Joel Mokyr, ‘Editor’s Introduction: The new economic history and the industrial revolution’, in Joel Mokyr (ed.), The New Economic History and the Industrial Revolution (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999), pp. 1–131, especially 47. Mariusz Kulczykowski, ‘Le travail de manufacture dans les familles paysannes au XVIIIe siècle’, in Annalisa Guarducci (ed.), Forme ed evoluzione del lavoro in Europa: XIII–XVIII secc., Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica F. Datini (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1991), 267–88, especially 273 (author’s translation). Stanley L. Engerman, ‘Expanding protoindustrialization’, Journal of Family History 17:2 (1992), 241–51, especially 244.

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production to income-earning work.14 De Vries’s microeconomic model focuses on the household, again defined as an economic unit. This approach follows Becker and Mincer’s new household economics, as de Vries himself explained: Developments in consumer theory and new approaches to the behavior of family members pioneered by Gary Becker and others have illuminated some corners of that notorious ‘black box’: the family, or household, as an economic unit. Through a focus on the allocation of time, this literature relates production and consumption decisions to each other in a fruitful way. Although some of these theoretical writings date from the 1960s, they have yet to be applied historically, or extended to accommodate historical change in household behavior.15

Since de Vries’s initial work, this approach has indeed been ‘applied historically’. By pushing households to shift their available time to paid work, Ogilvie argues, ‘[t]hese Consumer and Industrious Revolutions, it is believed, fueled the agricultural revolution, proto-industrialization, and factory industrialization – setting the stage for the Industrial Revolution and modern economic growth.’16 When de Vries shifted the focus to the early modern rural household, an obvious consequence was to find women and children working there – for the market, not just for household consumption.17 Here de Vries was following Mincer and Becker’s microeconomic approach to the family – maximizing behaviour and achieving equilibrium – as well as making fundamental assumptions about household production and interdependent preferences.18 14

15

16 17

18

Jan de Vries, ‘The industrial revolution and the industrious revolution’, Journal of Economic History 54:2 (1994), 249–70; Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Jan de Vries, ‘The industrious revolutions in East and West’, in Gareth Austin and Kaoru Sugihara (eds.), Labour-Intensive Industrialization in Global History (London: Routledge, 2013), 65–84. de Vries, Industrious Revolution, 8. In the introduction, de Vries writes: ‘Several modern developments in history and economics have guided my thinking about the household economy and consumer demand as historical phenomena.’ He mentions four: the revolt of the early modernists, the revisionist macroeconomics of the British Industrial Revolution, the western European marriage pattern, and new household economics. No mention is made of women’s history or feminist economics, two developments that have profoundly changed the social sciences, precisely by focusing on the economic workings of households and on women’s work. Sheilagh Ogilvie, ‘Consumption, social capital, and the “industrious revolution” in early modern Germany’, Journal of Economic History 70:2 (2010), 287–325. Carmen Sarasúa, ‘The economy of work’, in Deborah Simonton and Anne Montenach (eds.), A Cultural History of Work in the Age of Enlightenment (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 19–37. By ‘interdependent preferences’, I mean preferences that represent different points of view about the relative desirability of alternatives or that are based on multiple criteria that impinge on the decisions. For critiques of Becker’s neoclassical model of the household and the family, particularly on the assumption that households, as units, maximize utility, see Bina Agarwal,

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The extent to which rural women were employed in agriculture – and whether their labour supply for the manufacturing sector was seasonal – depended on several factors.19 First, demand for agricultural labour varied greatly with the kind of agriculture. In labour-intensive agriculture, demand was higher and year-round. In contrast, the dry farming of Mediterranean agriculture accounted for a heavily seasonal labour demand, with short peak seasons for grain harvest or grape or olive collection, followed by long periods of unemployment or under-employment. Peasants filled these downtimes with seasonal migration, transportation or construction activities (in the case of men), and domestic manufactures (in the case of women). In other cases, agricultural work was the first stage of a manufacturing productive process. Silk reelers, for example, grew and collected mulberry leaves, while linen spinners grew and bleached linen plants. Secondly, agricultural employment opportunities for women depended on technology. For England, demand for women’s work in agriculture seems to have been great in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but much less so in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when agriculture became much more mechanized.20 On the supply side, women’s patterns of manufacturing engagement depended on their roles within the family and on their families’ situations. Wives of farmers tended to engage in proto-industrial activities with flexible work rhythms in order to maintain their involvement in farm work, while women in landless households tended to engage in activities providing fulltime employment.21 A further development came with Ogilvie’s study of the German region of Württemberg and the question of whether institutional restrictions shaped women’s supply of labour. Ogilvie stressed that ‘in most early modern European economies women faced a huge array of institutional constraints on their work and consumption choices’ and asked whether ‘these widely varying restrictions on women [had] no impact on the Consumer and Industrious Revolutions?’22 It was a pertinent question, as institutional

19 20 21

22

‘Bargaining and gender relations: Within and beyond the household’, Feminist Economics 3:1 (1997), 1–51; Barbara Bergmann, ‘Becker’s theory of the family: Preposterous conclusions’, Feminist Economics 1 (1995), 141–45; Marianne Ferber, ‘A feminist critique of the neoclassical theory of the family’, in Karine S. Moe (ed.), Women, Family, and Work: Writings on the Economics of Gender (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), 9–23. For a discussion of women’s work in the agricultural sector, see Chapter 3. Jane Whittle and Mark Hailwood, ‘The gender division of labour in early modern England’, Economic History Review 73:1 (2020), 3–32, especially 16. Ulrike Pfister, ‘Proto-industrialization in Switzerland’, in Sheilagh Ogilvie and Marcus Cerman (eds.), European Proto-Industrialization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 137–54. Sheilagh Ogilvie, ‘Consumption, social capital’, 289.

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restrictions could be a factor accounting for the gender segregation of labour markets and in particular for the segregation of labour demand. Institutions could also function to incentivize or even force women to engage in new, more intensive forms of work. European states played a central role in organizing labour markets in the eighteenth century. They owned and promoted royal or privileged factories and served as the main clients for certain goods. The biggest client of the knitting industry in the Swedish region of southern Halland was the army; the expansion of the industry during the eighteenth century was directly linked to the state’s demand for military stockings for soldiers. During the Pomeranian War (1759–62), approximately 20,000–25,000 pairs of stockings per year were delivered to the military. A few decades into the nineteenth century, the knitting industry’s production capacity had grown to 40,000–50,000 pairs of stockings and sweaters. Similarly, knitting was a widespread rural industry in England, as Thirsk vividly documented.23 In northern Spain’s royal factory La Cavada, where cannons and various kinds of iron goods (mostly for the navy) were manufactured in the eighteenth century, some 200 women have been identified as workers, based on new archival evidence. They comprised only 10 per cent of the workforce during the 60 years covered by the research, but the finding was unexpected in an industrial sector that has traditionally been portrayed as all-male. As with most iron establishments, the factory at La Cavada was located in an area with abundant wood and water, distant from urban centres, where local people had been involved in the manufacturing of iron goods for centuries.24 Across Europe, royal factories, often established in rural settings, became the main employers of women, who usually worked in their homes, for instance, as spinners for textile factories. Whereas most theoretical models, following the neoclassical school, account for this work in terms of an increasing supply of labour, evidence shows that change came from the demand side. Increasing demand for labour – and, in particular, for cheap labour – accounts for the rising participation of women and children. More labour was required to capture the potential profits that growing markets, both urban and colonial, were creating. The growing demand for manufactures also

23

24

Per Göran Johansson, Gods, kvinnor och stickning. Tidig industriell verksamhet i Höks härad i södra Halland ca 1750–1870 (Lund: Studia Historica Lundensia, 2001), 225. Joan Thirsk, ‘The fantastical folly of fashion: The English stocking knitting industry, 1500–1700’, in N. B. Harte and K. G. Ponting (eds.), Textile History and Economic History: Essays in Honour of Miss Julia de Lacy Mann (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), 50–73. Luis Bartolomé and Pilar Díaz, Chicas de hierro. El trabajo de las mujeres en las Reales Fábricas de Artillería de Liérganes y La Cavada (Cantabria): 1759–1837 (Santander: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Cantabria, 2017).

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accounts for the dismantling of institutional restrictions, particularly guild privileges, that prevented women’s access to paid jobs. Changing the Narrative of Structural Change, Economic Growth, and Participation Rates Textiles were not the only manufactures in which rural women were extensively employed. Scholars have described women working in metallurgy, brick-making, pottery and porcelain, food preservation (salting, smoking, fruit-drying), and almost every other form of manufacture in rural workshops and cottages. As a capital-intensive and technologically-advanced sector, the iron industry was of particular importance, and women’s work in it has been well documented. The sector included a series of related activities, such as charcoal-making, mining and transportation, as well as furnace and forge work itself. In countries like Sweden, where the main organizational strategy of the mining sector was based on the bergsman household, women’s work was led by the male householder, who formed his own crew and sent its members into the mine. In the first half of the nineteenth century, women and children made up as much as 40 per cent of the workforce in some mines in the Nora and Linde area.25 The same occurred with furnace work. A bergsman’s household was responsible for auxiliary tasks at the blast furnace, for transporting goods to and from the furnace and for making charcoal and breaking ore. These tasks were undertaken by all household members, with wives and daughters deployed in transport. Widows also took over the household’s business when there was no male heir, meaning that women played a significant part in the industry.26 Textiles, however, remained by and large the main type of manufactured goods that was produced and consumed throughout pre-industrial Europe. (Textiles, it should be noted, were both consumer and investment goods.)27 25

26 27

A Swedish bergsman was a member of a peasant estate who supplemented agriculture with small-scale iron production. This iron production was intended for exchange for agricultural goods. The iron produced by bergsman was less refined and purchasers had to process it further to turn it into bar iron. Maria Sjöberg with Anton Tomilov, ‘Iron-making in peasant communities’, in Maria Ågren (ed.), Iron-Making Societies. Early Industrial Development in Sweden and Russia, 1600–1900 (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1998), 33–60, 35; Anders Florén and Göran Rydén with Ludmila Dashkevich, D. V. Gavrilov and Sergei Ustiantsev, ‘The Social organisation of work in mines, furnaces and forges’, in Maria Ågren (ed.), Iron-Making Societies. Early Industrial Development in Sweden and Russia, 1600–1900 (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1998), 61–138, 72. Florén et al., ‘Social organisation of work’, 89. If we accept that increasing demand was the cause of the rise of industrial output, then the reasons for the increasing demand in textile goods would be a combination of declining prices of agricultural goods due to agricultural growth, expansion of foreign demand and population growth, plus a change in tastes and rising income of consumers. See Joel Mokyr, ‘Demand vs.

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One of the first pieces of research to quantify the occupational distribution of men and women in eighteenth-century Europe was Gay Gullickson’s study of the French village of Auffay, which was a proto-industrial region where 82 per cent of the total adult population was occupied in non-agricultural activities in 1796.28 Its intense dedication to textile manufactures, mostly the production of cotton yarn, did not mean that there were no differences between women’s work and men’s work. The gender division of labour appeared here – as in other cases where poor agriculture led to manufactures becoming the main productive activity – in the form of division of tasks within the same economic sector. Men weaved; women and children spun. Even in this case, women outnumbered men in manufacturing: 92 per cent of women, but just 69 per cent of men, were occupied in textile manufacture. Similar patterns are found throughout Europe. Female Labour Force Participation Rates [LFPRs], in response to local demand for female labour, were particularly high in textile and pottery manufacturing districts, as well as where domestic industry provided plentiful opportunities for women’s employment. In agricultural and mining areas, by contrast, female LFPRs were considerably lower.29 A common element in studies of rural manufactures is the apparent tension with urban production under guilds. The rural context afforded greater flexibility for workers than was allowed by urban corporate controls.30 For some scholars, the reason why manufactures ‘moved’ to the countryside was the institutional barriers imposed by guilds. Here, one of the most relevant barriers was guilds’ opposition to women’s work.31 Studying the province of Saxony, Quataert described the conflict between guildsmen and Prussian officials over women’s manufacturing work in the seventeenth century as rural households expanded manufacturing for export and became competitive enterprises. In an attempt to shore up gender hierarchies, urban textile guilds in some parts of Central Europe restricted production for exchange to guildsmen alone. By the mid-seventeenth century, household production was clearly associated with women’s work by guildsmen who felt under threat.32 Empirical evidence for

28 29

30 31 32

supply in the industrial revolution’, Journal of Economic History 37:4 (1977), 981–1008, 982; de Vries, Industrious Revolution. Gay Gullickson, Spinners and Weavers of Auffay: Rural Industry and the Sexual Division of Labor in a French Village (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 127. Xuesheng You, ‘Women’s labour force participation in nineteenth-century England and Wales: Evidence from the 1881 Census Enumerators’ Books’, Economic History Review 73:1 (2020), 106–33. Hermann Kellenbenz, ‘Industries rurales en Occident: De la fin du Moyen Age au XVIIIe siècle’, Annales. Histoire, Science Sociales 18:5 (1963), 833–82. Sheilagh Ogilvie, A Bitter Living: Women, Markets and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Jean Quataert, ‘The shaping of women’s work in manufacturing: Guilds, households and the state in Central Europe, 1648–1870’, American Historical Review 90:5 (1985), 1122–48, especially 1124.

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the period from 1500 to 1700 corroborates this. Referring to England, Whittle and Hailwood conclude that ‘[w]omen clustered into those activities that were not regulated by apprenticeship, such as spinning, stocking knitting, and lace making.’33 The relationship between guilds and women workers was, however, complex, and changed over time. Furthermore, it was different within different European regions and countries. Growing demand for rural women’s labour could affect the working lives of urban women and in some cases the increasing deployment of rural labour in textiles could have a disastrous impact on urban women’s livelihoods. The 40 women who broke into a Council meeting in Barcelona in 1628 protested that they had been forced into poverty because the Council had allowed wool to be spun and carded outside the city.34 Most guilds could be described as associations of workers trying to maintain their privileged status as they competed with non-guild workers. Despite repeated admonitions, the Guild of Silk Cord-makers in Valencia made the Spanish government furious in 1779 with its resistance to girls being taught silk-reeling techniques. My Council, having noticed how harmful it was for the promotion of industry . . . the exclusions of women established by some of their Ordinances from the works which are more proper and suitable to their sex than to men, who for their robustness and strength seemed more appropriately applicable to agriculture, the armies and navy; and taking into account the fact that the Guild of Silk Cord-makers, Passementerie and Button Makers of the City of Valencia has attempted to prevent a School to teach the Girls all relative to the industry of cord-making be established . . . We order: that with no pretext you prevent, obstruct, or by the guilds or other people be prevented or hindered, the teaching to women and girls of all those works and artefacts that are proper for their sex, and that they can freely sell, by themselves or on their own account, the manufactures they make.35

Yet other guilds eventually evolved into powerful associations of merchants, with close connections to political power, and would become financial and commercial institutions. These guilds were fundamental in the expansion of manufacturing activity throughout the countryside, precisely because they sought reduced labour costs that would make their goods more competitive. In Spain, the largest and most powerful merchant corporation, the Confederación

33 35

34 Whittle and Hailwood, ‘Gender division of labour’, 26. See Chapter 5. ‘Real Cédula of 12 of January, 1779, by which is ordered that with no pretext be prohibited or obstructed, by the Guilds of these Kingdoms or other persons, the teaching to women and girls of all those works and artefacts that are proper of their sex, despite the regulations that in their Ordinances may the Masters of the respective Guilds have’. (En Madrid: en la Imprenta de Pedro Marín, 1779), my translation. Guilds’ continued obstruction to women’s admittance in several trades was one of the main reasons for their dissolution by European governments beginning in the last decades of the eighteenth century.

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de los Cinco Gremios Mayores de Madrid [Confederation of the Five Major Guilds of Madrid], to whom the crown was conspicuously indebted, was granted the management of the royal cloth factories of Guadalajara and Brihuega (including their branches), the royal silk factory of Talavera de la Reina, and the royal cloth factory of Cuenca. These large enterprises actively sought out carders and spinners to supply yarn to the factory premises where weaving and subsequent finishing were carried out. This could only be done by increasing the labour supply of women and children in smaller units of production, known as escuelas de hilazas. Introducing spinning lathes for higher productivity, the Confederación created a new network of lathespinners over which it held a monopoly, undercutting local fabricantes’ command of local networks of women spinners.36 A similar case of complementarity, rather than competition, between urban guilds and rural manufactures has been described for the Greek region of Thessaly, where, in the second half of the eighteenth century, urban industries dominated by the guild system were declining, while rural industries in mountainous towns and villages were expanding. Rural industries were not innovating, either in products and techniques, or in opening new markets, but they responded positively, on the one hand, to the growing strains of the guild system and the worsening entrepreneurial climate in the urban industrial centres, and on the other hand, to the continuous growth of effective demand for dyed cotton yarn in Central Europe and for textiles in the Empire whose population was expanding.37

Once historians had discovered great numbers of women in rural manufactures, particularly in the textile sector, new questions arose. Were there characteristics of rural manufactures that made them more favourable to women’s paid work? Did the absence, or limited impact, of institutional restrictions, such as those of powerful urban guilds, act as an incentive for women’s employment? Was demand for rural women’s labour the consequence of escaping guild pressures or rather a cause of the widespread development of rural industries? Or both? In any case, it is clear that proto-industry contributed to higher participation rates, particularly for women and children. Saito found high labourparticipation rates for women in England in the 1780s, especially for married women. In Cardington, women’s participation rate was 82 per cent. In at least

36

37

José A. Nieto Sánchez and Victoria López Barahona, ‘Women’s work and protoindustrialisation: Madrid and New Castile (1750–1850)’, in Bruno Blondé, Michele Galand and Eric Vanhaute (eds.), Labour and Labour Markets between Town and Countryside (Middle Ages–19th century), CORN Publication Series, 6 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), 254–65. Socrates Petmetzas, ‘Patterns of proto-industrialization in the Ottoman Empire: The case of Eastern Thessaly, ca.1750–1860’, Journal of European Economic History 19:3 (1991), 575–604, especially 583.

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some localities, women’s eighteenth-century participation rates were higher than rates in the 1850s and even higher than current rates. Those high rates were the result of the ‘combined effect of poverty and opportunity provided by the cottage industry’.38 ‘In proto-industrial societies, like Risorgimento Italy, women are expected to have a lower agricultural and higher industrial labour share than men.’39 Despite its contributions, the explanatory potential of the proto-industrialization model has been questioned, since many proto-industrial regions failed to industrialize in the nineteenth century, while their population growth and economic growth were often uneven. Still, the old proto-industry literature has attracted renewed interest because its findings are consistent with recent scholarship on long-term changes in occupational structure.40 This research shows, first, the widespread importance of non-agricultural occupations, particularly in textile industries (but also in shoe, food and metallurgy industries) and services (domestic service, commerce and transportation) at least a century before industrialization; secondly, the importance of women and children’s work, who were more concentrated in non-agricultural occupations than were men;41 and thirdly, the link between demand for labour (coming from regional economic structures) and women’s LFPR.42 Table 4.1 shows the two main occupations declared by men and women, from a sample of inland towns in mid-eighteenth-century Spain. The pattern is consistent – men’s main occupations were in the primary sector (farmer, day labourer, shepherd), except in the city of Guadalajara, where there was a royal factory; in two small towns where most people were occupied making footwear from esparto grass; and in the village of Villaviciosa, with just 194 people and a large monastery with many monks. Women’s main occupations were either unpaid domestic work (in su casa, her home) or some kind of textile manufacture, including lacemaking, wool and flax spinning, clothes manufacturing and stocking making. Increasing returns from agricultural production were not the only factor accounting for the higher incomes of European households prior to industrialization, households’ higher levels of consumption or the expansion of 38

39 40

41 42

Osamu Saito, ‘Who worked when: Lifetime profiles of labour force participation in Cardington and Corfe Castle in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’, Local Population Studies 22 (1979), 14–29, especially 27. David Chilosi and Carlo Ciccarelli, ‘Evolving gaps: Occupational structure in southern and northern Italy, 1400–1861’, Economic History Review 75 (2022), 1349–78, 1356. Leigh Shaw-Taylor and E. A. Wrigley, ‘Occupational structure and population change’, in Roderick Floud, Jane Humphries and Paul Johnson (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, vol. 1: 1700–1870, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 53–88. Carmen Sarasúa, ‘Women’s work and structural change: Occupational structure in eighteenthcentury Spain’, Economic History Review 72:2 (2019), 481–509. Shaw-Taylor, ‘Diverse experiences’, 29–50.

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Table 4.1. First- and second-most declared occupations by men and women, inland Spain, 1750s Town

Men

Women

Alcaraz Villarrobledo Albaladejo Alcolea de Calatrava Almagro Bolaños Campo de Criptana Las Casas Pedro Muñoz Puebla del Príncipe Terrinches Torre de Juan Abad

Agric labourer Agric labourer Agric labourer Agric labourer Agric labourer Agric labourer Agric labourer Farmer Agric labourer Agric labourer Agric labourer Agric labourer

16.0 24.0 20.0 21.6 26.8 29.6 28.9 31.2 32.3 27.1 27.1 26.6

Farmer Farmer Farmer Farmer Farmer Farmer Servant in husbandry Forestry labourer Farmer Farmer Farmer Farmer

12.0 13.5 13.3 20.8 7.9 22.8 10.5 22.1 20.5 17.9 15.7 19.9

Wool spinner Housework Wool spinner Clothing manufact Lace maker Lace maker Housework Stocking maker Housemaid Housework Housework Housemaid

27.3 43.5 19.9 47.6 33.3 49.4 43.4 60.4 22.2 47.5 39.7 20.3

Valenzuela de Calatrava Brihuega Guadalajara Villamanrique Villarejo de Salvanés Villaviciosa Ajofrín Alanchete El Carpio Quintanar

Agric labourer Farmer Wool weaver Esparto product maker Esparto product maker Monks in convents Agric labourer Agric labourer Agric labourer Agric labourer

42.1 16.8 13.1 37.5 15.5 32.9 26.4 26.7 17.9 23.8

Farmer Wool weaver Monks in convents Farmer Farmer Farmer Wool weaver Farmer Sheep husbandry Mule driver

12.4 8.4 13.0 35.4 12.5 26.3 15.8 25.3 17.5 13.2

Lace maker Wool spinner Housemaid Esparto product maker Esparto product maker Housework Housemaid Wool spinner Housework Housework

58.2 38.1 43.6 87.0 41.8 25.0 35.5 32.1 27.1 37.9

Source: Sarasúa, ‘Women’s work’

Housework Wool spinner Housemaid Lace maker Housemaid Sewing school Wool spinner Lace maker Housework Sewing school Flax spinner Baker Wool spinner Housework Housemaid Nuns in convents Housemaid Housemaid Farmer Wool spinner Housemaid Housemaid Wool spinner

22.7 15.2 8.3 19.6 30.5 19.5 22.2 28.3 16.7 23.0 34.7 17.4 17.4 16.4 24.2 21.8 4.3 18.9 20.8 26.9 32.1 22.0 26.2

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internal markets for manufactured goods. A second economic motor, probably even more decisive, was the intensification of work through new work opportunities – Jan de Vries’s industrious revolution – in which rural domestic manufactures and women’s work played central roles. However, the literature following de Vries has largely focused on urban production and markets and on changes in consumption patterns and much less on rural manufactures. Furthermore, it has largely left untouched the traditional narrative of economic modernization as characterized by structural change in GDP and employment. This is now being challenged by researchers across Europe, who argue that putting women into the narrative changes our understanding of economic modernization. Since the 1980s, scholarship on protoindustry has documented that rural manufactures were central to pre-modern European economies, yet standard interpretations of economic modernization still assign the vast majority of workers before industrialization to the primary sector. Data to support the mainstream account come from sources that focus almost exclusively on the occupations of men. The majority of women, and particularly married women, are regarded as non-workers and thus disappear from economic history. In eastern Thessaly, women were the main labour force in rural industry, in this case silk and cotton manufactures, a development that would be invisible if only men’s occupations were considered. Women undertook silkworm breeding and the production of raw silk and women and children spun raw cotton and reeled silk thread for the weaving that was produced by men, without any system of guild regulation.43 The growing evidence of women’s extensive participation in rural manufactures forces us to acknowledge that if we only consider changes in men’s occupational structure, we will continue to get an inaccurate picture of when, where, why and how structural change happened. Conversely, by studying rural manufactures in pre-industrial Europe, we gain a more accurate picture of how economic modernization occurred. Inevitably, this points to the central role that women’s work played in the transformation. Labour-Intensive Industrialization: Skill, Productivity and Low Wages in Cottage Industries In addition to its profound influence on participation rates and structural change, the proto-industrial economy is now given a central explanatory role in two key developments of the initial stages of economic modernization. First, widespread employment in manufactures reflects labour-intensive

43

Petmetzas, ‘Patterns’, 589.

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industrialization, a stage preceding capital-intensive industrialization (or capital-led growth).44 In rural manufactures, it was labour – not yet capital – that provided the main input to production processes. Second, given that productive processes before mechanization required a larger labour force and given that many proto-industrial regions did not industrialize, it is safe to assume that the percentage of workers in the secondary sector was higher in eighteenth-century Europe than in the fully industrial nineteenth century. In England and Wales, a sharp decrease in the total labour force (women and men) in the textile sector has been described after the mechanization of spinning. It is likely that something similar occurred in many other places.45 As has been noted, most proto-industrial literature did not focus on the gender division of labour or the role of women and children’s work in rural domestic manufactures. By focusing, instead, on the ‘household’ or the ‘family’, these accounts effectively buried the fact of women and children’s toil within such ‘productive units’. Things have changed since the ‘re-discovery’ of spinning, following Muldrew’s path-breaking article.46 Recent works have identified wool, and then cotton, spinning as the most labour-intensive occupation before its mechanization in the late-eighteenth century. In England, demand for spinners provided employment for around 19 per cent of working women in 1700, compared to 12.5 per cent in the late-sixteenth century. Antonio Zanon estimated that, in northern Fruili alone in Italy there were some 100,000 peasant women spinning, ‘a craft that they start doing as young girls, and continue until they are very old’, which they did without abandoning their agricultural and domestic duties. These women worked with linen, hemp, silk, cotton and wool and the most skilled could spin 40 pounds each year (the average was 30 pounds per year), which amounted to three million pounds of spun material each year, just from the countryside.47 Wool, linen and hemp spinning were also part of domestic industry in central and northern Italy, as were the initial stages of all raw materials for textile production, including silk. ‘[T]his was the kingdom of the female labour force.’48 In 1726, the cloth

44 45 46

47 48

Austin and Sugihara (eds.), Labour-Intensive Industrialization. www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/research/occupations/overview (last accessed 11 January 2023). Same results for Spain, Sarasúa, ‘Women’s work’. Craig Muldrew, ‘“Th’ancient distaff” and “whirling spindle”: Measuring the contribution of spinning to household earnings and the national economy in England, 1550–1770’, Economic History Review 65:2 (2012), 498–526. Antonio Zanon, Dell’Agricoltura, dell’Arti e del comercio, in quanto unite contribuiscono allá felicità degli Stati . . . (Venezia: Appresso Modesto Fenzo, 1765), 185–86. Walter Panciera, ‘Emarginazione femminile tra politica salariale e modelli di organizzazione del lavoro nell’industria tessile veneta nel XVIII secolo’, in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), La donna nell’economia (secco. XIII–XVIII), Atti della Ventunesima Settimana di Studi, Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica F. Datini (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1990), 585–96, especially 587.

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factory of Linussio employed about 4,600 spinners dispersed by the Carnia in Friuli. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the wool factories of the high Vicentino region employed 6,000 women, who worked at home. In economic terms, this could occur because rural manufacturing had an abundant input, labour, with a low cost. So economic historians have been forced to address the question of whether that input’s ‘low price’ accorded with the expected low skills and low productivity of low-wage workers. Women’s work in rural industries has traditionally been defined as low-skill.49 This has fulfilled two functions: naturalizing the gender division of labour, and ‘explaining’ the gender wage gap. However, the idea that women’s work was cheaper because it was less skilled is contradicted by the fact that many of the manufactured goods produced in those cottages required great skills and went to luxury markets. Bobbin lace, gold and silver thread embroidery and silk ribbon making – all luxury goods with growing demand in urban and colonial markets throughout the eighteenth century – are good examples of products that required high levels of skill.50 Whether women’s low wages in rural manufactures reflected their low marginal productivity51 – or a cultural devaluation of whatever work they did, no matter how highly skilled – takes us to a key issue in the debate: the role of labour costs as incentives or disincentives to industrialization. Technological innovation would be more likely to occur where labour costs are high, whereas an abundance of cheap labour acts as a disincentive to capital investment and technological change.52

49 50 51

52

‘In the cottage industries women performed mostly low-skill jobs, left most of the skilled work to men, and were excluded from apprenticeship’. Mokyr, ‘Editor’s introduction’, 61. Daryl M. Hafter, European Women and Preindustrial Craft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). Proto-industry would have increased rural workers’ overall productivity – particularly women’s – by avoiding seasons of under-employment and unemployment. As noted by Engerman, ‘[p]rotoindustry is seen as important in providing the opportunity for a longer work year to women’, ‘Expanding protoindustrialization’, 248. According to Robert Allen’s ‘High Wage Economy’ (HWE) thesis, the Industrial Revolution first occurred in Britain because the high costs of labour relative to capital and fuel motivated the development and adoption of labour-saving techniques, which included the spinning jenny. Allen’s HWE thesis has been contested in Jane Humphries and Benjamin Schneider, ‘Wages at the wheel: Were spinners part of the high wage economy?’, Oxford Economic History Working Papers, 174 (Oxford: Oxford University, 2019) and Jane Humphries and Jacob Wiesdorf, ‘The wages of women in England 1260–1850’, Journal of Economic History 75:2 (2015), 405–47, which provide new evidence that hand-spinning was a low-income, low-productivity occupation. Humphries has argued that ‘mechanisation, especially the development of the factory, was motivated by the desire to use cheaper child and female labour in a way that ensured discipline and quality control’, Humphries and Schneider, ‘Wages at the wheel’, 4. Other authors argue that industrialization occurred faster and earlier in low-wage economies. For Mokyr, ‘the linen industry in Flanders generated a pool of low-wage labour that provided the technologically innovative cotton industry with a “quasi-rent”, facilitating continuous reinvestment in the

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Directions for Further Research A better understanding of how rural manufactures were organized in preindustrial Europe is key to understanding how economic modernization, GDP growth and structural change took place. More empirical evidence is needed about the manufacturing regions, gender segregation and the numbers of workers and their individual characteristics (age, civil status, skills). We need to know more about how much women were paid, a difficult issue since the majority of domestic manufacturing workers were paid by the piece. A start has been made for England with Humphries and Schneider’s research on the wages of hand spinners and Humphries and Weisdorf’s wage indices for women workers in both casual and annual employment.53 In particular, women’s specialization in rural manufactures in eighteenthcentury Europe is connected to five major research topics. First, it relates to increases in household income, improvement in living standards and poverty reduction. Describing the economy of rural Auffay, Gullickson concluded, ‘[w]ithout women’s earnings in cottage industry, either the number of families living in absolute poverty would have been much higher or the population of the region would have been smaller’.54 The impact of women’s earnings on household economies has been described similarly for the Swedish region of Halland in the eighteenth century. Johansson concluded that ‘[d]uring the period covered in this study, a great number of rural households in southern Halland produced knitted wool products. The female labour force had an essential role in early industrial textile production, although children and some men could also knit . . . their income from knitting was low, but still significant for the support of a family.’55 Paid work is key to the improvement of women’s living conditions, in that it provided higher negotiating capacity within the family, voice and social recognition. Although earning a wage cannot be interpreted as having control of one’s own resources, paid work did allow married women to contribute to household income and to their children’s needs, while allowing unmarried women to save for their dowries and widows to support themselves.56

53 54 56

modern industrial sector, during the “growing up” period when traditional, or proto-industrial manufacturing coexisted with modernizing industry’, as summarized in Jane Gray, ‘The Irish, Scottish and Flemish linen industries during the long eighteenth century”, in Brenda Collins and Philip Ollerenshaw (eds.), The European Linen Industry in Historical Perspective, Pasold Studies in Textile History, 13 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 159–68. Humphries and Schneider, ‘Wages at the wheel’; Humphries and Wiesdorf, ‘Wages of women’. 55 Gullickson, Spinners and Weavers, 82. Johansson, Gods, kvinnor och stickning, 225. Beatrice Moring and Richard Wall, Widows in European Economy and Society, 1600–1920 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2017). For a qualification of paid work as guaranteeing women with an improved social and economic position, see Jane Humphries and Carmen Sarasúa, ‘The

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Secondly, women’s work in rural manufactures is linked to the increasing connection of local economies to distant markets. Women’s jobs in cottage industry were less diversified than men’s and more dependent on external employers and markets. While ‘the vast majority of goods produced by artisans and merchants in such villages such as Auffay was consumed locally [. . .] [w]ithout the spinning industry, or some other large female employer, the economic structure of the entire region would have been vastly different.’57 There is increasing evidence that women’s manufacturing work was particularly export-oriented, precisely because it was cheaper. For example, in Scotland, although wool had been exported to the Netherlands, France and the Baltic from the late-sixteenth century, the real boom in demand was associated with the brief colonization of Brazil by the Dutch West India Company from the 1630s to the 1660s when Scottish woollens were shipped from Aberdeen, via Holland (where they were finished), to Brazilian sugar plantations and used as slave blankets and marketed to local populations. In such cases, ‘it was not so much urban work, as manufacturing work carried out in the countryside and villages for the urban market, or rather a type of production chain that has been defined as “proto-industrial” and where female work had a central role’.58 Thirdly, rural manufacturing can be linked with technological innovations, product innovations and distribution and organizational innovations (such as the flexible networks developed in the countryside to replace the functions and structures of urban guilds). As shown by Maxine Berg, the impact of rural women’s employment in non-agricultural jobs was not only about their numbers but also their concentration in the trades that introduced more innovations.59 Here, the question of ‘skill intensity’ must be considered: ‘The concept of skill intensity is considerably more important than the capital-orlabour question for a better understanding of the ways in which the “improvement of the quality of labour” took place as a vital element in global diffusion of industrialization.’60 We need to investigate how skills were gained, whether young workers had access to formal systems of apprenticeship and to what extent discipline, punctuality and willingness to respond to various incentive

57 58 59

60

feminization of the labor force and five associated myths’, in Günseli Berik and Ebru Kongar (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Economics (London: Routledge, 2021), 167–76. Gullickson, Spinners and Weavers, 82. Anna Bellavitis, Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 61. Maxine Berg, ‘What difference did women’s work make to the industrial revolution?’, History Workshop Journal 35:1 (1993), 22–44; Maxine Berg, The Age of Manufactures, 1700–1820: Industry, Innovation and Work in Britain, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994). Osamu Saito, ‘Proto-industrialization and labour-intensive industrialization: Reflections on Smithian growth and the role of skill intensity’, in Gareth Austin and Kaoru Sugihara (eds.), Labour-Intensive Industrialization in Global History (London: Routledge, 2013), 85–106, 101.

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schemes were critical to the success of the factory system – and, of course, differences between women and men workers in each of these areas. Fourthly, the scope and structure of rural manufacturing can inform debates on population growth, demography and the modernization of the family system. The recent attention attracted by the ‘European Marriage Pattern’ (EMP), characterized by late female marriage, high female celibacy, low fertility and small and simple nuclear-family households, has renewed interest in the connections between demographic patterns and women’s paid work.61 Indeed, women’s celibacy rates and marriage age increased during the early modern period, as male emigration soared. Low sex ratios and high female celibacy should have created generous labour market opportunities for women. Higher female celibacy rates were possible only when opportunities for paid employment outside of the farm developed, as occurred in manufacturing areas. As Gullickson noted, ‘[s]pinning allowed some single and widowed women to support themselves without the assistance of an adult male wage earner . . . Throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, between 10 and 15 percent of the households in Auffay were headed by women, a fairly high percentage for an eighteenth-century village.’62 Pamela Sharpe’s study of Colyton confirmed the connection between the availability of employment for women and their possibility of living outside marriage, something that the original proto-industrial model, with its focus on the household as economic unit, had not foreseen. This effect of women’s employment contradicts an original hypothesis of the proto-industrial literature, namely that rural industry explained population growth. Women’s employment may instead ‘have had a more general braking effect on population growth before the mid eighteenth century’.63 More recently, de Moor and van Zanden have argued that women who spent time as servants delayed marriage and reduced fertility. The resulting ‘Northern European Marriage Pattern’ (NEMP), identified initially by Hajnal in 1965, raised incomes and promoted further growth.64 Evidence on the connection between women’s employment and age at marriage is, however, inconclusive. Humphries and Weisdorf did not find that women on annual contracts (young unmarried servants) shared in the post-plague boom, but Horrell, Humphries and Weisdorf recently concluded that early modern women did marry later if their 61

62 63

64

Tine de Moor and Jan Luiten van Zanden, ‘Girl power: The European Marriage Pattern and labour markets in the North Sea region in the late medieval and early modern period’, Economic History Review 63:1 (2009), 1–33. Gullickson, Spinners and Weavers, 78. Pamela Sharpe, ‘Literally spinsters: A new interpretation of local economy and demography in Colyton in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, Economic History Review 44:1 (1991), 46–65, especially 63. De Moor and van Zanden, ‘Girl power’.

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own wages increased.65 Even if men’s wages rose, women’s often rose too, which put a brake on early marriage and so on fertility. The fifth, and final, research topic to which this chapter relates is preindustrial manufactures, women’s work and the gender segregation of labour markets after the eighteenth century. The key role of demand factors in accounting for women’s supply of labour66 has recently been confirmed in the occupational structure of women in England and Wales in the second half of the nineteenth century: The spatial patterns of female LFPRs show an unmistakable link between the demand for female labour and female LFPRs. Higher levels of female labour force participation were to be found in areas with industries that generated greater demand for female labour. Supply-side conditions such as life stage, number of children, and other household members’ employment had clear effects on female LFPRs as well. However, these effects were limited by the demand-side conditions.67

Rural manufactures before the industrialization era generated an exceptionally high demand for women’s labour, leading to participation rates that were possibly higher than modern ones.68 We need to know more about the economic, social and institutional context that accounted for this high demand – and about the workers and the impact they had on economic growth and the improvement of living standards.

65

66 67 68

Humphries and Weisdorf, ‘Wages of women’; Sara Horrell, Jane Humphries and Jacob Weisdorf, ‘Malthus’s missing women and children: Demography and wages in historical perspective, England 1280–1850’, European Economic Review 129 (2020), 1–23. Jane Humphries and Carmen Sarasúa, ‘Off the record: Reconstructing women’s labor force participation in the European past’, Feminist Economics 18:4 (2012), 39–67. You, ‘Women’s labour force participation’, 131. Humphries and Sarasúa, ‘Feminization of the labor force’.

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5

Urban Markets Anna Bellavitis

Introduction Much of the research that in the last decades has been done on women’s work and on the role of women in early modern economies deals with the urban context: the sources of guilds and of municipal institutions; the records of hospitals and monasteries; journals, account books and letters, as well as judiciary, notarial and police archives have shed light on the many activities of women in the cities of early modern Europe. The bibliography is huge and continues to grow richer and richer throughout Europe and yet one may wonder whether all this production has been able to rewrite the history of work in early modern European cities. Some European regions, such as England and Holland, have been more studied than others, thanks to an ancient tradition of research supported by prestigious institutions. In other areas, research is less advanced, but for this very reason it is important to maintain an approach that is as open as possible and try to ask questions that will stimulate new research.1 Defining cities is already difficult in itself; studying them from a comparative point of view is even more complex, despite some common elements that characterize cities. These include the existence of specific rights linked to residence, such as citizenship rights; the existence of a labour market regulated by institutions, such as guilds; the presence of care and charitable institutions from the Middle Ages and increasingly so in the early modern period; and the fact that, unlike in the countryside, work was not, with some exceptions, of a seasonal nature. In urban labour markets, identity, skills, social and gender roles were in tension with each other. The competition between men and women played a 1

A fundamental but too often forgotten contribution is Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (Florence: Le Monnier, 1990). For recent overviews see Deborah Simonton (ed.), The Routledge History Handbook of Gender and the Urban Experience (London: Routledge, 2017); Anna Bellavitis, Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

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central role, but it is also important to take into consideration the competition between female workers and between workers organized in institutions such as guilds and independent workers, be they male or female. Another key point to highlight is the possibility of action and creativity in the economic and social field, offered by a heterogeneous and moving space like the early modern European city – with, it should be emphasized, the additional possibility and capacity for political action.2 The urban labour markets of early modern Europe combined two opposite and at the same time complementary features. They were regulated and structured by institutions, like the guilds, the city councils and the various kinds of hospices, shelters and convents offering more-or-less coerced employment opportunities for the poor, orphans and ‘repented’ women or women who were in danger of losing their honour. Yet they were also flexible and open, offering chances and opportunities to immigrant and non-qualified workers as well as the possibility of earning in activities at the limits of, or beyond, legality. These different and specific labour markets should be studied in relation to each other because it is only their interpenetration that can account for the gendered reality of the urban economies of early modern Europe. On the basis of these observations and these questions, the aim of this chapter is to present the state of existing research but also to try to propose a vision of urban economies that integrates the gender dimension and maintains an approach that is as Europe-wide as possible. The chapter is divided into two parts: the aim of the first part is to present quantitative data on women’s work activities in different urban contexts, based on available sources. The second part focuses on the problem of guilds and on aspects of work organization more broadly. Working Women Making Women’s Work Count in the Cities Early modern European cities were the melting pot of technical, economic, political and social innovation, even if some of the most important economic developments of the early modern period, such as the Industrial Revolution and, even more so, proto-industry, cannot be considered urban phenomena. What is certain is that the period is characterized by a significant growth of the urban population all over Europe. In 1500, only 4 European cities had more than 100,000 inhabitants; by 1800 there were 22. Most of them were capital cities and their growth reflects the concentration of functions typical of capitals 2

Anne Montenach, ‘Coping with economic uncertainty: Women’s work and the protoindustrial family in eighteenth-century Lyon’, Continuity and Change 35:1 (2020), 33–52.

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of states and the development of administration, although the case of London remains unique, with a population that multiplied by 19 from 1500 to 1800. In other cases, population growth depended on the development of specific economic activities and especially the intensification of maritime trade. Eastern Europe and Scandinavia were less urbanized but their capital cities also grew considerably, especially during the eighteenth century. Across Europe, women represented between 52 and 57 per cent of the urban population, albeit with specific chronologies. The most notable exception was Rome, the capital of the Papal State and the centre of Catholicism, populated by religious and pilgrims, mostly male.3 In the urban context, the available quantitative sources on populations are censuses and tax registers but these sources usually only provide information on the activity of the head of household and much more rarely on that of other family members. It must also be said that female workers were sometimes just too poor to be taxable: it is for this reason that more female silk spinners than female wool spinners appear in the tax registers of medieval Paris.4 Women with Registered Occupations in Different Sources Tables 5.1–5.5 provide a survey of women with registered occupations in different sources, using data collected from censuses, tax registers, court records and archives of charitable institutions. A comparison, based on nonhomogeneous sources, between large capitals such as London or Paris and small towns such as Chalon-sur-Saône (France) or Bruhiega (Spain), is certainly problematic but these are some of the data from which to start. When several censuses are available for the same city some change over time can be detected. For example, in the case of Leiden, the percentage of women with registered occupations increased during the early modern period: an evolution that is in contrast with the image of the Netherlands as ‘the first male breadwinner economy’.5 One notes the disparities according to periods and places but also the disparities across records for the same city in the same period, as in the case of Turin, where the comparison between the 1802 census and the registers of the Charity Hospital of 1796 has shown that the same women that were ‘unoccupied’ in the census were registered as artisans in the

3 4 5

Olivier Zeller, ‘La ville moderne’, in Jean-Luc Pinol (ed.), Histoire de l’Europe urbaine, vol. 1 (Paris: Le Seuil, 2003), 593–858. Sharon A. Farmer, The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris: Artisanal Migration, Technological Innovation and Gendered Experience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). Ariadne Schmidt and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, ‘Reconsidering the “first malebreadwinner economy”: Women’s labor force participation in the Netherlands, 1600–1900’, Feminist Economics 18:4 (2012), 69–96.

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Table 5.1. Percentage of women with registered occupations in population censuses and fiscal sources, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries Place

Period

Category

Proportion of women with registered occupation (per cent)

Leidena Leidena Chalon-sur-Saôneb Lyonc Genevac

1581 1749 1751–1752 1788 1798

Heads of households Heads of households Taxpayers Taxpayers Total population

14 20 25 9 32

Sources: Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, ‘Segmentation in the pre-Industrial labour market: Women’s work in the Dutch textile industry, 1581–1810’, International Review of Social History 51:2 (2006), 189–216. b James. B. Collins, ‘Women and the birth of early modern capitalism’, in Daryl Hafter and Nina Kushner (eds.), Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015), 152–76. c Scarlett Beauvalet-Boutouyrie, Les femmes à l’époque moderne (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Paris: Belin, 2003).

a

Table 5.2. Percentage of women with registered occupations in population censuses and fiscal sources, by status, seventeenth to eighteenth centuries

Place

Period

Category

Proportion of women with registered occupation (per cent)

Dutch citiesa

Leidena Antwerpb

1600 1675 1750 1800 1749 1796

Vila do Condec Portoc Parisd Nantese Rennese Landernaue Almagrof Guadalajaraf Brihuegaf Krakowg Warsawg

1643 1698 1743 Eighteenth century Eighteenth century Eighteenth century 1750–55 1750–55 1750–55 1791 1791

Heads of households Heads of households Heads of households Heads of households Female heads of households Married women Unmarried women Widows Female heads of households Female heads of households All women Taxpaying women Taxpaying women Taxpaying women Women aged 10–60 Women aged 10–60 Women aged 10–60 Unmarried women and widows Unmarried women and widows

8 10–19 8–24 15–23 82 39 92 77 7 40 24 43 74 56 26 27 47 78 66

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Table 5.2. (cont.) Proportion of women with registered occupation (per cent)

Place

Period

Category

Bologna (4 parishes)h

1796

Female heads of households

68 63 53 39

Turinb

1705

Turinb

1802

Married women Daughters Female co-resident relatives (non-servants) Female co-resident non-relatives (non-servants) Women aged 11–70 Married women born outside the city Women aged 15 or above Female heads of households Female non-heads of households Women aged 15 or above Female heads of households Female non-heads of households Married women Unmarried women aged 25 or above Widows

63 64 76 23 45 3 33 54 23 22 56 49

Sources: a Ariadne Schmidt and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, ‘Reconsidering the “first male-breadwinner economy”: Women’s labor force participation in the Netherlands, 1600–1900’, Feminist Economics 18:4 (2012), 69–96. (Years are benchmark years.) These figures represent the proportions of female household heads with a recorded occupation as a percentage of all household heads (rather than as a percentage of female household heads as in the remainder of this table). b Beatrice Zucca Micheletto, ‘Reconsidering women’s labor force participation rates in eighteenthcentury Turin’, Feminist Economics 19:4 (2013), 200–23. c Amélia Polónia, ‘Women’s participation in labour and business in the European maritime societies in the early modern period. A case study (Portugal, 16th century)’, in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), La famiglia nell’economia europea, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studio della Fondazione Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato, (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2009), 705–19. d Sabine Juratic and Nicole Pellegrin, ‘Femmes, villes et travail en France dans la deuxième moitié du XVIIIe siècle’, Histoire, économie et société 3 (1994), 477–500. e Nancy Locklin, Women’s Work and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Brittany (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). f Carmen Sarasúa, ‘Women’s work and structural change: occupational structure in eighteenthcentury Spain’, Economic History Review 72:2 (2019), 481–509. g Andrzej Karpinski, ‘Les femmes seules chefs de famille dans la société urbaine à la fin de l’Ancienne Pologne’, in La femme dans la société médiévale et moderne (Warsaw: Institut d’histoire Académie polonaise des sciences, 2005), 211–35. h Maura Palazzi, ‘“Tessitrici, serve, treccole”. Donne, lavoro e famiglia a Bologna nel Settecento’, in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (Florence: Le Monnier, 1990), 359–76.

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Table 5.3. Women with registered occupations in care institutions, eighteenth century

Place

Period

Category

Turin Charity Hospitala

1785–99

Paris Hôtel Dieub

1791

Women aged 15 or above Married women Unmarried women aged 25 or above Widows Married women Unmarried women Widows

Proportion with registered occupation (per cent) 63 73 64 59 74 90 87

Sources: a Beatrice Zucca Micheletto, ‘Reconsidering women’s labor force participation rates in eighteenthcentury Turin’, Feminist Economics 19:4 (2013), 200–23. b Sabine Juratic and Nicole Pellegrin, ‘Femmes, villes et travail en France dans la deuxième moitié du XVIIIe siècle’, Histoire, économie et société 3 (1994), 477–500.

Table 5.4. Women with registered occupations in court records, seventeenth to eighteenth centuries

Place

Period

Category

Proportion with registered occupation (per cent)

London (church courts)a

1695–1725

London (criminal court)b

1745–52

Married women Unmarried women Widows Married women

60 83 85 99

Paris (Maréchaussée)c

1750–90

94

Paris (Châtelet)c

1750–90

Women accused of stealing food Women arrested Unmarried mothers

92 75

Sources: a Peter Earle, ‘The female labour market in London in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries’, Economic History Review 42:3 (1989), 328–53. b Amy L. Erickson, ‘Married women’s occupations in eighteenth-century London’, Continuity and Change 23:2 (2008), 267–307. c Sabine Juratic, ‘Solitude feminine et travail des femmes à Paris à la fin du XVIIIe siècle’, MEFRIM 99:2 (1987), 879–900.

sources of the hospital.6 In other contexts, such as Bologna or Paris, percentages rise in the case of specific populations, such as immigrants or women in care institutions. In criminal sources, the high percentages of women with 6

Beatrice Zucca Micheletto, ‘Reconsidering women’s labor force participation rates in eighteenth-century Turin’, Feminist Economics 19:4 (2013), 200–23.

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Table 5.5. Women with registered occupations in marriage contracts in eighteenth-century France

Place

Period

Category

Proportion with registered occupation (per cent)

Lille Lyon

1750–54, 1780–84 1786–88

Brides Brides born outside the city

80 85

Source: Dominique Godineau, Les femmes dans la France moderne (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle) (Paris: A. Colin, 2015).

registered occupations depended on different registration criteria and on the specific sector of the urban population represented in the records, but this could also be a consequence of the fact that these were precarious populations, for whom the claim of a job could be a defence strategy.7 Among women who were heads of households and among women who paid taxes, percentages of registered occupations were usually higher. This is not surprising, even if in many cases among female heads of households there were also widows with no resources. This was the case in the small Portuguese city of Vila do Conde, although the percentage of women who were heads of households was much higher there than in Porto.8 The percentage of married women with a registered occupation is generally lower than for widows, but there are exceptions, as in the case of Bologna, which could depend on the social structure of the parishes taken into consideration.9 Many researchers have shown how difficult it is to find married women’s occupations, in ‘quantitative’ sources to the point that it has been proposed, in the case of a married craftsman at the head of a family, to systematically extend the profession of the husband to the wife.10 Research has also shown that the percentages of wives of artisans without a recorded occupation in urban censuses were higher when the man had a ‘masculine’ profession (smith, carpenter, etc.) and, quite probably, husband and wife worked together – the wife keeping the

7 8

9

10

Sabine Juratic and Nicole Pellegrin, ‘Femmes, villes et travail en France dans la deuxième moitié du XVIIIe siècle’, Histoire, économie et société 3 (1994), 477–500. Amélia Polónia, ‘Women’s participation in labour and business in the European maritime societies in the early modern period. A case study (Portugal, 16th century)’, in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), La famiglia nell’economia europea, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studio della Fondazione Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato, (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2009), 705–19. Maura Palazzi, ‘“Tessitrici, serve, treccole”. Donne, lavoro e famiglia a Bologna nel Settecento’, in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (Florence: Le Monnier, 1990), 359–76. Darlene Abreu-Ferreira, ‘Work and identity in early modern Portugal: What did gender have to do with it?’, Journal of Social History 35:4 (2002), 859–87.

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accounts and selling in the shop – than when the husband was a textile artisan and the wife had an activity in the same sector.11 Measuring labour productivity and quantifying the economic contribution of any worker is a very complex task, especially in past societies where many variables remain unclear, such as the difficulty of measuring working time. It is especially important that the unpaid work often provided by married women that resulted in marketable goods or services is not excluded from the analysis of urban economy.12 Ariadne Schmidt and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk have estimated women’s and children’s contribution to increased production during the rapid development of the Dutch textile industry in the seventeenth century. According to their calculations, about 50 per cent of women who were not heads of household were occupied in the textile industry in the mid1600s.13 Daryl Hafter has argued that, in eighteenth-century Lyon, ‘it was commonly understood that wives of masters produced one-quarter of the workshop’s output under the license of the male head of household’.14 In 1752, a general survey of persons working in the silk industry of Lyon (the Grande Fabrique) indicated that, of 2,638 master weavers, two thirds were married and their wives and children constituted an additional workforce of some 2,400 persons.15 The contribution of wives and children of master craftsmen to the productive work of the family workshop was de facto recognized and codified by the regulations of urban guilds that allowed wives’ and daughters’ work in workshops and that authorized the widow of the master and sometimes also his daughters to continue to run the family business. Cities, Change and Women’s Work Women were active in all sectors of urban economies, as can be seen in Tables 5.6–5.9. They worked at the lower levels, for example doing heavy work on building sites,16 or in domestic service, a sector that became increasingly

11

12

13

14 15 16

Schmidt and van Nederveen Meerkerk, ‘Reconsidering’; Sandra Cavallo, ‘Métiers apparentés. Barbiers-chirurgiens et artisans du corps à Turin (XVII–XVIII siècle)’, Histoire Urbaine 15 (2006), 27–48. Manuela Martini and Anna Bellavitis (eds.), ‘Households, family workshops and unpaid market work in Europe from the sixteenth century to the present’, History of the Family 19:3 (2014), 273–82. Schmidt and van Nederveen Meerkerk, ‘Reconsidering’; Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, ‘Couples cooperating? Dutch textile workers, family labour and the “industrious revolution”, c. 1600–1800’, Continuity and Change 23:2 (2008), 237–266. Daryl M. Hafter, Women and Work in Preindustrial France (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2007), 66. Montenach, ‘Coping’. Elisabeth Musgrave, ‘Women and the craft guilds in eighteenth-century Nantes’, in Geoffrey Crossick (ed.), The Artisan and the European Town, 1500–1900 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 151–71.

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Table 5.6. Women’s work in services, seventeenth to eighteenth centuries

Place

Period

Category of service

Percentage female

Reggio Emiliaa Rome (one parish)a Turina Genevab

1708 1765 1802 1798

London (church courts)c

1695–1725

London (criminal court)c Rotterdamd

1728–1800 1680 1727

Servants Servants Servants Workers in services Servants Innkeepers Teachers Nursing/medicine (married women) Charring/laundry Hawking/carrying Hawking/carrying (married women) Lower-level offices Lower-level offices

56 48 60 58 92 30 35 10 17 11 21 16 30

Sources: a Beatrice Zucca Micheletto, ‘Reconsidering the southern European model: Dowry, women’s work and marriage patterns in pre-industrial urban Italy (Turin, second half of the 18th century)’, History of the Family 16:4 (2011), 354–70. b Lilian Mottu-Weber, ‘L’évolution des activités professionnelles des femmes à Genève du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle’, in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (Florence: Le Monnier, 1990), 345–57. c Amy L. Erickson, ‘Married women’s occupations in eighteenth-century London’, Continuity and Change 23:2 (2008), 267–307. d Manon van der Heijden and Ariadne Schmidt, ‘Public services and women’s work in early modern Dutch towns’, Journal of Urban History 36:3 (2010), 368–85.

feminized all over Europe, being the most accessible ‘honest’ employment, especially for women coming from the countryside.17 Domestic service was not only a job for young girls though: 42 per cent of unmarried women aged 30 or above were servants in Turin in 1802.18 In artisans’ households, servants took part in the production of the workshop, as evidenced by a Venetian law of 1579 stating that in the mirror makers’ workshops there should not be more than four workers and that the female domestic servants had to be included in that number.19 On the other hand, a survey of the Lyon silk industry in

17 18

19

See Chapter 6. Beatrice Zucca Micheletto, ‘Reconsidering the southern European model: Dowry, women’s work and marriage patterns in pre-industrial urban Italy (Turin, second half of the 18th century)’, History of the Family 16:4 (2011), 354–70. Venice State Archives, Giustizia Vecchia, b. 5, reg. 13, f 87.

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Table 5.7. Women’s work in retail, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries

Place

Period

Category of retailer

Percentage female

Krakowa

Amsterdamc Nantesd

1545 1598 1629 1640 Seventeenth century 1710 Seventeenth century 1600–1800 1750 –1800 1770s–80s 1620–50

Saint-Malod Rennesd London (church courts)e London (criminal court)e

1653 1621–54 1652 1695–1725 1728–1800

Genevaf

1798

Market stall holders Market stall holders Market stall holders Active traders Household heads in retailing Vegetable sellers Fish sellers Offal sellers Coffee and tea sellers Fish sellers Bakers Butchers Tavern-keepers Drapers Mercers Catering/victualling (married women) Catering/victualling (married women) Shop keeping Shopkeepers and merchants

57 65 70 83 30–40 64 70 75 80 88 10–20 10 16 18–28 23 13 10 24 27

Warsawa Dutch citiesb Leidenb

Sources: a Andrzej Karpinski, ‘The woman on the market place. The scale of feminization of retail trade in Polish towns in the second half of the 16th and the 17th century’, in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (Florence: Le Monnier, 1990), 283–92. b Ariadne Schmidt and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, ‘Reconsidering the “first male-breadwinner economy”: Women’s labor force participation in the Netherlands, 1600–1900’, Feminist Economics 18:4 (2012), 69–96. c Danielle van den Heuvel, Women and Entrepreneurship. Female Traders in the Northern Netherlands, 1580–1815 (Amsterdam: Askant, 2007). d James B. Collins, ‘The economic role of women in seventeenth-century France’, French Historical Studies 16:2 (1989), 436–70. e Amy L. Erickson, ‘Married women’s occupations in eighteenth-century London’, Continuity and Change 23:2 (2008), 267–307. f Lilian Mottu-Weber, ‘L’évolution des activités professionnelles des femmes à Genève du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle’, in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (Florence: Le Monnier, 1990), 345–57.

1752 placed some female workers in the category of domestic servants.20 Women also worked in the most specialized ‘new’ crafts, such as printing or watchmaking. In Geneva, in 1798, almost one third of the workers in 20

Monica Martinat, ‘Travail et apprentissages des femmes à Lyon au XVIIIe siècle’, MEFRIM 123:1 (2011), 11–24.

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Table 5.8. Women’s participation in trade, seventeenth to eighteenth centuries Place a

Barcelona Sevillea Londonb Amsterdamb Hamburgb Straslundc Lubeckc Osloc Gothenburgc

Period

Category of Traders

Percentage female

1650–1720 1650–1700 Mid-eighteenth century Mid-eighteenth century Mid-eighteenth century 1755–1815 1755 1743 1784 1743 1791 1810

Owners of merchant companies Exporters Wealthiest merchants Wealthiest merchants Wealthiest merchants Merchants resident in the city Grain exporters Merchants Merchants Merchants Merchants Owners of merchants’ houses

5 6 5–15 5–15 5–15 11 20 11 6 14 8 12

Sources: a Angels Solà Parera, ‘Las mujeres como productoras autónomas en el medio urbano (siglos XIV– XIX)’, in Cristina Borderías (ed.), La historia de las mujeres: perspectivas actuales (Barcelona: Icaria 2009), 225–67. b Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, Worthy Efforts: Attitudes to Work and Workers in Pre-industrial Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2012). c Daniel A. Rabuzzi, ‘Women as merchants in eighteenth-century northern Germany: The case of Stralsund, 1750–1830’, Central European History 28:4 (1995), 435–56.

Table 5.9. Women’s work in crafts, seventeenth to eighteenth centuries Place a

Florence

Period

Craft

Percentage female

1604

Wool weavers Wool workers Wool workers Silk workers Making/mending clothes (married women) Making clothes (married women) Workers in production Workers in textiles Clothing Watchmaking

62 40 38 84 23

1662–63 London (church courts)b

1695–1725

London (criminal court)b Genevac

1728–1800 1798

17 25 54 54 30

Sources: a Judith C. Brown and Jordan Goodman, ‘Women and industry in Florence’, Journal of Economic History 40:1 (1980), 73–80. b Amy L. Erickson, ‘Married women’s occupations in eighteenth-century London’, Continuity and Change 23:2 (2008), 267–307. c Lilian Mottu-Weber, ‘L’évolution des activités professionnelles des femmes à Genève du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle’, in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (Florence: Le Monnier, 1990), 345–57.

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watchmaking were women.21 A new urban industry across Europe, employing a concentrated female workforce, were the tobacco factories: the one in Madrid, founded in 1790, employed 800 female workers in 1809.22 Women were active in all sectors of textile production: in Florence, in 1662–63, 84 per cent of silk workers were women.23 In London, between 1775 and 1787, women made up 57.9 per cent of workers occupied in clothmaking who took out a contract with the Royal Exchange Insurance.24 The most important female guilds were in the textile sector. For example, in 1775, there were 200 mistresses in the linen weavers’ guild of Rouen. In 1675, 1,000 seamstresses joined the new Parisian guild: about a third of the seamstresses working in Paris at the time.25 The majority of female workers in textile production worked at home or in workshops, but some of them were concentrated in manufactures, such as the Van Robais woollen industry of Abbeville, where, in 1767, 200 female workers represented as much as 36 per cent of the skilled workforce. However, even the Van Robais could not do without the hundreds of hand spinners in the surrounding area.26 Many women in the cities were spinners, but the increasing transfer of some stages of manufacturing activity, especially spinning, to the countryside is also a typical phenomenon of the period.27 Proto-industrial processes occurred in many European regions, but the Italian silk industry, which was one of the most important for women’s work, maintained a very strong urban identity due to the prohibition imposed by guilds on workers ‘beyond the city walls’. In eighteenth-century Bologna, 12,000 independent female weavers worked for the merchants of the silk guild: 17 per cent of the total population of the city.28

21

22 23 24 25 26

27 28

Lilian Mottu-Weber, ‘L’évolution des activités professionnelles des femmes à Genève du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle’, in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (Florence: Le Monnier, 1990), 345–57. Victoria López Barahona, Las Trabajadoras en la sociedad madrileña del siglo XVIII (Madrid: ACCI, 2016), 55. Judith C. Brown and Jordan Goodman, ‘Women and industry in Florence’, Journal of Economic History 40:1 (1980), 73–80. Margaret Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family in England, 1680–1780 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Clare Crowston, Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675–1791 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). Daryl Hafter, ‘French industrial growth in women’s hands’, in Daryl M. Hafter and Nina Kushner (eds.), Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 177–201. See Chapter 4. Fabio Giusberti, Impresa e avventura. L’industria del velo di seta a Bologna nel XVIII secolo (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1989); Alberto Guenzi, ‘La tessitura femminile tra città e campagna. Bologna, secoli XVII–XVIII’, in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (Florence: Le Monnier, 1990), 247–59.

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If the relocation of spinning offered income opportunities to rural populations, at the same time it deprived urban workers of them. The consequences of the increasing use of rural labour on some groups of female urban workers must not be ignored. They were potentially disastrous, according to the 40 women who, in 1628, broke into a meeting of the Consell de Cent (Council of the One Hundred) in Barcelona, accusing the councillors of forcing them into poverty because they did not prevent wool from being carded and spun outside the city.29 The development of cities and exchanges also offered a boost to another traditional women’s activity: the management of urban hospitality. In Nantes, in 1653, 16 per cent of tavern-keepers were women while, in Geneva, in 1798, women made up 30 per cent of tavern-keepers.30 Women at the market, both as buyers and sellers, were a ubiquitous presence in early modern Europe. In the first decades of the eighteenth century, 57 per cent of the new tea and coffee sellers in Leiden were women and, after 1750, that had risen to 80 per cent. Only in the more traditional commerce of haberdashery, fish and offal selling is it possible to find similarly high rates of female sellers and they were increasingly married women (from 3 per cent in 1700–20 to 60 per cent in 1740–60), who were wives mostly of textile workers, craftsmen, as well as wage labourers. Many applied for a license to sell these colonial products some years after marriage and having had their first children.31 The fashion market was important among the new possibilities opening up for women: milliners became a significant presence in early modern cities. It was a Europe-wide phenomenon, which can be found in major capitals such as London or Paris, but also Madrid and Venice and in medium-sized cities such as Aberdeen, Auxerre, Grenoble or La Rochelle.32 In Grenoble, the 1739 poll tax registers named 24 female mercers. By 1789, they were partly replaced by more specialized shopkeepers, such as milliners, jewellers, grocers, booksellers 29

30 31

32

Marta Vicente Valentín, ‘Mujeres artesanas en la Barcelona moderna’, in Isabel Pérez Molina (ed.), Las mujeres en el Antiguo Régimen. Imagen y realidad (s. XVI–XVIII) (Barcelona: Icaria, 1994), 57–90. See Chapter 4. Mottu-Weber, ‘L’évolution’; James B. Collins, ‘The economic role of women in seventeenthcentury France’, French Historical Studies 16:2 (1989), 436–70. Schmidt and van Nederveen Meerkerk, ‘Reconsidering’, 78; Danielle van den Heuvel and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, ‘Households, work and consumer changes: The case of tea and coffee sellers in 18th-century Leiden’, MEMS Working Papers 2 (2014). López Barahona, Las Trabajadoras; Tiziana Plebani, ‘Socialità e protagonismo femminile nel secondo Settecento’, in Nadia M. Filippini (ed.), Donne sulla scena pubblica. Società e politica a Venezia tra Settecento e Ottocento (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2008), 25–80; Deborah Simonton, ‘Milliners and marchandes de mode: Gender, creativity and skill in the workplace’, in Deborah Simonton, Marjo Kaartinen and Anne Montenach (eds.), Luxury and Gender in European Towns, 1700–1914 (London: Routledge, 2015), 19–38; James B. Collins, ‘Women and the birth of early modern capitalism’, in Daryl M. Hafter and Nina Kushner (eds.), Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 152–76.

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and 23 milliners (marchandes de mode), a profession that did not exist at the beginning of the century.33 The growing complexity of the administrative apparatus, especially at the urban level, offered new employment opportunities to women. In Rotterdam, in 1680, 16 per cent and, in 1727, 30 per cent of the lower offices in general administration, public order and safety, public works, trade and transport, health and social care, education and the church were occupied by women.34 The administrative tasks entrusted to male staff could also be carried out by husband and wife and, similarly to what happened in artisan workshops, widows could inherit their husbands’ jobs and carry them out themselves.35 Since the Middle Ages, in Flanders, southern Germany and northern Italy municipal midwives were paid by the city community. During the early modern period there was a widespread tendency to progressively transfer midwifery skills to male doctors, but this did not prevent certain women from pursuing real careers and publishing books on their ‘art’, such as Madame du Coudray in France or the Van Putten sisters in Holland, who were granted the title of ‘obstetrician’ at the end of the eighteenth century by feminizing the male formula, vroedmeester, to vroedmeestere.36 The ‘commercial revolution’ of the early modern period also opened new valuable opportunities for some urban women. In Portuguese coastal towns in the sixteenth century, women were active participants in companies involved in the fishing and sale of Newfoundland cod, and also in the import of fabrics from London and other European towns, or in the export of wine: in Aveiro, in 1552, almost one third of the registered ships belonged entirely or in part to women.37 During the eighteenth century, in Amsterdam, London and Hamburg, women constituted between 5 and 15 per cent of the wealthiest merchants. In many important cities of Northern Europe, such as Augsburg, Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig, many important commercial and manufacturing businesses were run by independent merchants’ widows.38 Female 33

34 35

36 37 38

Anne Montenach, ‘Creating a space for themselves on the urban market: Survival strategies and economic opportunities for single women in French provincial towns (seventeenth–eighteenth centuries)’, in Julie De Groot, Isabelle Devos and Ariadne Schmidt (eds.), Single Life and the City 1200–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 50–68. Manon van der Heijden and Ariadne Schmidt, ‘Public services and women’s work in early modern Dutch towns’, Journal of Urban History 36:3 (2010), 368–85. Schmidt and van Nederveen Meerkerk, ‘Reconsidering’; Maria Ågren, ‘Another process of state formation: Swedish customs officials, their work and households’, Cultural and Social History 11:1 (2014), 31–49. Hilary Marland (ed.), The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe (London: Routledge, 1993). Darlene Abreu-Ferreira, ‘Fishmongers and shipowners: Women in maritime communities of early modern Portugal’, Sixteenth Century Journal 31:1 (2000), 7–23. Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, Worthy Efforts: Attitudes to Work and Workers in Pre-industrial Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

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merchants worked in many sectors of wholesale trade, for example, those in Stralsund traded in commodities including wine, salt, textiles, spices, cereals, wool and porcelain. They had contacts in various centres of international trade all over Europe. A significant female presence in international trade is also documented in other cities of the ancient Hanseatic League and in Sweden and Norway.39 In French Atlantic ports, many married women conducted a different business from their husbands’, benefiting from the status of ‘female merchant in the public domain’ (marchande publique).40 In eighteenth-century Cadiz, there was such a large increase in notarial deeds giving power of attorney, in which merchants and shipowners leaving for the colonies named their wives as their legal representatives, that they prompted a backlash from the conservative press.41 In ports, women invested in maritime trade: this was the case in medieval Venice and Genoa, as well as in early modern Atlantic ports.42 In early modern Nantes, good profits could be made by entrusting the captain of a ship with goods to sell in other ports: marriage contracts specified the sum that brides, including those who were servants, had added to her own dowry, thanks ‘to profits made at sea’.43 The presence of women in associated urban circuits of credit has long been highlighted by research on northern Europe and in particular on Britain’s financial revolution and similar findings have recently been made for the rest of Europe.44 The transfer of care and assistance functions to institutions is a long-lasting phenomenon that is widespread throughout Europe, albeit in specific ways and chronologies, linked above all to the different role of religious and secular institutions in Protestant and Catholic Europe. Care institutions, hospitals and, in the Catholic world, convents and beguinages, were concentrated in the

39 40

41 42

43

44

Daniel A. Rabuzzi, ‘Women as merchants in eighteenth-century northern Germany: The case of Stralsund, 1750–1830’, Central European History 28:4 (1995), 435–56. Nicole Dufournaud and Bernard Michon, ‘Les femmes et l’armement morutier. L’exemple des Sables-d’Olonne pendant la première moitié du XVIIIe siècle’, Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest 110:1 (2003), 93–113. Paloma Fernández Pérez, El rostro familiar de la metropóli. Redes de parentesco y lazos mercantiles en Cádiz, 1700–1812 (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno de España Editores, 1997). Douglas Catterall and Jodi Campbell (eds.), Women in Port: Gendering Communities, Economies, and Social Networks in Atlantic Port Cities, 1500–1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Linda Guzzetti, ‘Gli investimenti delle donne veneziane nel Medioevo’, Archivio Veneto 3 (2012), 41–66; Bernard Michon and Nicole Dufoumaud (eds.), Femmes at négoce dans les port européens (fin du Moyen Age–XIXe siècle) (Bern: Peter Lang, 2018). Nicole Dufournaud and Bernard Michon, ‘Les femmes et le commerce maritime à Nantes (1660–1740). Un rôle largement méconnu’, Clio. Histoire‚ femmes et sociétés 23 (2006), 311–30. Giovanna Petti Balbi and Paola Guglielmotti (eds.), Dare credito alle donne. Presenze femminili nell’economia tra medioevo ed età moderna (Asti: Centro studi Renato Bordone sui Lombardi, sul credito e sulla banca, 2012); Amy M. Froide, Silent Partners: Women as Public Investors during Britain’s Financial Revolution, 1690–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Elise Dermineur (ed.), Women and Credit in Pre-Industrial Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018).

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cities.45 Those institutions carried out multiple functions such as control, repression, protection, assistance and also offered the possibility of paid work as well as positions in government and power for women. In some cases, the process of ‘professionalization’ that characterized the early modern period led to the marginalization of women from labour markets, but this was not the case in sectors in which qualities that were considered as typically ‘female’, like care-giving and nurturing, were important as was the case in orphanages and hospitals.46 Moreover, those institutions offered to some women a level of ‘prestige’ in urban society.47 We must also take into account the work that was done in female convents and in those institutions that were founded, both in Catholic and Protestant Europe, with the aim of teaching a craft to poor and orphaned girls.48 Nuns intervened in some phases of silk production, to the point that in 1529 some silk weavers complained to the Venetian Senate because of the competition from the city’s monasteries in the preparation of warps and in Seville one of the reasons for the import ban on foreign silk in 1621 was the fact that many convents were no longer able to support themselves.49 In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venice, lace-making was largely carried out in institutions of assistance for women and in nunneries. It was an extremely skilled production that continued to expand during the seventeenth century, and lace was exported by merchants at great profit.50 In the Roman Conservatorio delle Mendicanti, in 1659, 120 poor ‘spinsters’, were engaged in the production of different kinds of cloth, a wide-ranging and specialized process, which also 45

46 47

48

49

50

Andrzej Karpinski, ‘Women in professional and socio-religious corporations in Polish towns during the sixteenth–seventeenth Century’, in La femme dans la société médiévale et moderne, (Institut d’Histoire Académie Polonaise des Sciences, 2005), 189–210; Sarah J. Moran, ‘Administration at the Court Beguinages of the southern Low Countries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, Journal of Early Modern History 22 (2018), 67–95. Ariadne Schmidt, ‘Managing a large household: The gender division of work in orphanages in Dutch towns in the early modern period, 1580–1800’, History of the Family 13:1 (2008), 42–57. Monica Chojnacka, Working Women of Early Modern Venice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Ofelia Rey Castelao, ‘Trabajando a cubierto’, Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 40:2 (2010), 73–93. Clare Crowston, ‘L’apprentissage hors des corporations. Les formations professionnelles alternatives à Paris sous l’Ancien Régime’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 60:2 (2005), 409–41; Ole Peter Grell, Andrew Cunningham and Bernd Roeck (eds.), Health Care and Poor Relief in 18th and 19th Century Southern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Andrea Caracausi and Corine Maitte (eds.), ‘Le istituzioni caritative come luoghi di lavoro (secc. XVI– XX)’, Mediterranea 48 (2020), 83–122. Luca Molà, ‘Le donne nell’industria serica veneziana del Rinascimento’, in Luca Molà, Reinhold C. Mueller and Claudio Zanier (eds.), La seta in Italia dal Medioevo al Seicento. Dal baco al drappo (Venice: Marsilio, 2000), 424; Elisabeth Perry, ‘Lost women in early modern Seville: The politics of prostitution’, Feminist Studies 4:1 (1978), 195–214. Patricia Allerston, ‘An undisciplined activity? Lace production in early modern Venice’, in Thomas Buchner and Philip R. Hoffmann-Rehnitz (eds.), Shadow Economies and Irregular Work in Urban Europe (Wien, Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011), 63–71; Satya Datta, Women and Men in Early Modern Venice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).

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required the work of 100 external girls, who, in three ‘schools’, spun the warp threads.51 The teachers in those institutions were craftswomen and sometimes real entrepreneurs, such as Maria Mondelli, who in 1785 was paid 100 ecus by the Conservatorio della Divina Provvidenza in Civitavecchia, together with her husband and her brother, for teaching the young orphaned girls to use a new spinning mill of French manufacture, with sixteen spindles, which she owned. Nevertheless, the population census made no mention of Maria’s activities; she was registered only as a wife.52 Finally, as a consequence of the increasing control exercised in the early modern age, prostitution is a typically female activity on which we can find quantitative data. In seventeenth-century Rome, the number of prostitutes ranged between 604 and 1,200 and, in the year 1600, there were 2.5 prostitutes for every 100 adult women. They were mostly young and recently arrived in town. Of the 240 prostitutes surveyed in Campo Marzio in 1656 (out of a total of 1,138 in the city), 43 per cent were listed as ‘comfortable’ and the remaining 57 per cent as ‘poor’: none as ‘rich’, but none as ‘destitute’ either.53 In Amsterdam, between 1650 and 1750, 8,099 trials for prostitution involved 4,633 prostitutes, 898 female pimps and 253 men. In the second half of the seventeenth century, 3,149 women, aged between 18 and 25 years, were sentenced for prostitution, one in five from Amsterdam, the others immigrants from other Dutch, German or Scandinavian cities.54 Periods of economic expansion such as those experienced by many urban centres in the early modern age offered unprecedented possibilities, within the limits allowed by the institutions that regulated the labour market. Many similarities can be found among the most active and dynamic European cities of that age and it is evident that these groups of women were active protagonists in these processes of urban change. A Debated Decline Guilds in the Cities The economic role of the guilds has been the subject of heated debate among historians for decades.55 There has been talk in recent years of a ‘return of the 51 52

53 54 55

Angela Groppi, I conservatori della virtù. Donne recluse nella Roma dei Papi (Rome: Laterza, 1994). Angela Groppi, ‘Une ressource légale pour une pratique illégale. Les juifs et les femmes contre la corporation des tailleurs dans la Rome pontificale (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles)’, in Renata Ago (ed.), The Value of the Norm/Il valore delle norme (Rome: Biblink, 2002), 137–62. Tessa Storey, Carnal Commerce in Counter-Reformation Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Lotte C. van de Pol, The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Sheilagh Ogilvie, The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).

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guilds’ and much research has shown that the monopoly on production and distribution exercised by these institutions was not necessarily an obstacle to economic development.56 The relationship between guilds and women has also been debated. Merry Wiesner, Cynthia Truant and Sheilagh Ogilvie have stressed the male character of the guilds, ‘brotherhoods’, whose ‘social capital’ had to be preserved among master craftsmen.57 The ‘decline thesis’, which maintains that women were excluded from guilds during the early modern period, has long dominated the historiographical debate, but such a pessimistic view, mostly based on research on Germany, has been nuanced and modified by recent research on other parts of Europe and especially on France. The most important challenge to the ‘decline thesis’ is in fact posed by the evidence of growing economic opportunities for women from the lateseventeenth century onward, as shown by research on Dijon, Nantes, Brittany and Burgundy.58 The cases of Rouen and Paris, where female guilds existed since the middle age (e.g., lingères en neuf) and where new female guilds were created at the end of the seventeenth century, are particularly significant. The guild of new linen weavers and tailors of linen cloths (lingères en neuf) in Rouen was female-only and even the officers were women. Active in both wholesale and retail, in the middle of the seventeenth century the lingères en neuf clashed with male linen weavers and obtained from the Rouen Parliament the monopoly over the wholesale and retail trade of cotton items of all sizes, colours and shapes, both locally produced and imported. These new commercial privileges were added to those obtained a century earlier when the lingères had been granted the right to control, in collaboration with the royal administration, the arrival of raw materials from the countryside to the city market.59 In spite of this wide success, according to the 1775 tax registers of Rouen, the incomes of widows who were members of male guilds were 10 times higher than those of widows who were members of female guilds.60 This finding is not surprising: it is not possible to compare the capital mobilized by male guilds such as goldsmiths or wool cloth makers and merchants

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Jan Lucassen, Tine De Moor and Jan Luiten van Zanden (eds.), ‘The return of the guilds’, International Review of Social History 53:Supplement 16 (2008), 5–18. Merry E. Wiesner, Working Women in Renaissance Germany, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986); Merry E. Wiesner, ‘Guilds, male bonding and women’s work in early modern Germany’, Gender & History 1:2 (1989), 125–37; Cynthia M. Truant, The Rites of Labor: Brotherhoods of Compagnonnage in Old and New Regime France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Sheilagh Ogilvie, A Bitter Living: Women, Markets, and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Clare Crowston, ‘Women, gender, and guilds in early modern Europe: An overview of recent research’, International Review of Social History 53:Supplement 16 (2008), 19–44. Daryl M. Hafter, ‘Stratégies pour un emploi: travail féminin et corporations à Rouen et à Lyon, 1650–1791’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 54:1 (2007), 98–115. Daryl M. Hafter, ‘Les veuves dans les corporations de Rouen sous l’Ancien Régime’, in Nicole Pellegrin and Colette H. Winn (eds.), Veufs, veuves et veuvage dans la France d’Ancien Régime (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003), 121–33.

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with the income of guilds working with much less expensive, but fundamental materials for daily life, such as linen. In Paris, the female guild of seamstresses was created in 1675 and its tasks were defined according to precise gender distinctions: seamstresses could not employ men as waged employees and tailors could not employ women, except for the members of their own families. Seamstresses had to work exclusively with women’s clothing, but the court ladies’ clothes were the tailors’ responsibility. Other plans to create exclusively female crafts associations in Paris (for example, women greengrocers, hairdressers, schoolteachers, tripe sellers, stocking darners, egg sellers, herbalists, beret-makers) did not succeed. In 1776, French guilds were temporarily abolished and the seamstresses reacted against the reform, by addressing three ‘memos’ to the king, where they declared that, without the protection of the guild, men would steal work from women, who instead had to be able to freely develop their skills, abilities and talents, from eloquence to scientific ability, in all professions, including law, medicine and literature. The tailors opposed the reforms, too, but with very different arguments: the guild order reflected social order, where fathers and heads of families were like the master craftsmen, whose duty, that the authorities had to guarantee and defend, was to protect women and children. The opposing arguments of seamstresses and tailors show that gender was not the only factor shaping the conflict. In fact, it was not only a dispute between men and women, but a wider conflict involving women who depended on men or worked with them in the family workshop. In Caen, when the seamstresses had joined the tailors’ guild, conflict had broken out between women: the seamstresses were opposed to the tailors’ widows stating that, as they had not followed the period of apprenticeship that was imposed on them, they did not have the right to take over the running of the workshops from their husbands.61 In the eighteenth century, there was a tendency in several European cities to open up guilds to women, particularly in the textile sector, in the context of increased demand in the clothing and accessories sector.62 In 1754, the Venetian silk weavers’ guild was opened to women in order to counteract the competition from Lyon by lowering production costs. It was an initiative of the merchants that was opposed by the master craftsmen, as the silk weavers’ mistresses accepted lower fees and therefore were more competitive than the workshops run by male masters.63 Opening access to guilds to women in order 61 62

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Crowston, Fabricating Women. Deborah Simonton, ‘Toleration, liberty and privileges: Gender and commerce in eighteenthcentury European towns’, in Deborah Simonton (ed.), The Routledge History Handbook of Gender and the Urban Experience (London: Routledge, 2017), 33–46. Marcello Della Valentina, ‘Il setificio salvato dalle donne: le tessitrici veneziane nel Settecento’, in Anna Bellavitis, Nadia M. Filippini and Tiziana Plebani (eds.), Spazi, poteri, diritti delle donne a Venezia in età moderna (Verona: QuiEdit, 2012), 321–35.

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to lower production costs was also an aspect of the Spanish government’s reformist projects in the eighteenth century, to the point that guilds’ obstruction of women’s membership can be seen as one of the main reasons for their dissolution.64 Inside, Outside and against Craft Guilds In 1990, Angela Groppi proposed the image of an ‘accordion movement’, of opening and closing opportunities for women, depending on multiple circumstances.65 Research carried out in recent years has highlighted specific causalities and chronologies in European urban contexts.66 In times of crisis, when the competition between men and women in urban labour markets was more pronounced, as happened for example in German cities in the sixteenth century, there was a tendency to reduce women’s access to skilled jobs. On the other hand, political upheavals could modify the hierarchies of urban powers and favour greater openness, as happened in London during the Restoration.67 In Madrid, the new guilds founded in the sixteenth century when the city became the capital of the Spanish Empire excluded women from apprenticeship and ‘embarked on a real crusade against female mastery’.68 In contrast, in Zaragoza, explicit prohibitions to admit women to the guilds were rare and appear only in two statutes, the middlemen’s from 1505 and the mattress makers’ from 1556.69 In 1655, a female guild of hacklers was established in Gouda as a response to a revolt of female hacklers who complained about low wages and the threat that the craft would be concentrated in the hands of just a few masters. The city council allowed the hacklers to have their own guild, probably in order to avoid a stagnation of production. In 1664, the city council decided to abolish the guild, because the craft

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Carmen Sarasúa, ‘The economy of work’, in Deborah Simonton and Anne Montenach (eds.), A Cultural History of Work in the Age of Enlightenment (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 19–38. Angela Groppi, ‘Un questionario da arricchire’, in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (Florence: Le Monnier, 1990), 143–54. Crowston, Fabricating Women; Crowston, ‘Women, gender and guilds’; Groppi, ‘Une ressource légale’; Hafter, Women and Work; Simonton, ‘Toleration’; Muriel González Athenas, ‘Legal regulation in eighteenth-century Cologne: The agency of female artisans’, in Deborah Simonton and Anne Montenach (eds.), Female Agency in the Urban Economy: Gender in European Towns, 1640–1830 (London: Routledge, 2014), 151-68. Anne Laurence, Women in England, 1500–1760: A Social History (London: Phoenix Giant, 1994); Laura Gowing, Ingenious Trade: Women and Work in Seventeenth-Century London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). López Barahona, Las Trabajadoras, 77. Francisco Ramiro Moya, Mujeres y trabajo en la Zaragoza del siglo XVIII (Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, 2012).

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declined and the craft was then regulated by city authorities, with significant interference by the rope-makers’ guild.70 The complex identities of guilds and particularly their different roles in the economic and political context of the cities and states of early modern Europe must be taken into account and it has been suggested that the guilds most inclined to accept the presence of women as mistresses were those least endowed with political power.71 In some cases, guilds allowed specific economic privileges to women who were not their members: it was a system of ‘moral economy’ intended to prevent the impoverishment of urban populations. This was the case of the weavers’ guild of Basel at the end of the fifteenth century, and of the mercers’ guild of Venice during the sixteenth century.72 In other cases, new possibilities for women came from the conflicts between urban governments and guilds: in 1636, the city council of Barcelona allowed women who were not members to weave and sell taffetas that were the monopoly of the silk weavers’ guild. The city government had the moral duty to give poor women the possibility to make a living and the development of silk manufacturing in seventeenthcentury Barcelona was an important source of income for the town finances.73 Competition in the urban labour market could have the opposite effect: in some cases it resulted in the expulsion of women from guilds, as happened in the Holy Roman Empire, under moral and religious pretexts; in others competition was the impetus behind women’s integration, in order to impose greater control on their work and to maintain production standards and collect registration fees. In neither case was it a peaceful or shock-free process: craftswomen continued to produce and compete with master craftsmen, working clandestinely outside the guild, as happened in Augsburg, or refused to join the guilds, as in Bologna and Udine.74 It was also the case in eighteenth-century 70 71 72

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Ariadne Schmidt, ‘Women and guilds: Corporations and female labour market participation in early modern Holland’, Gender & History 21:1 (2009), 170–89. Simona Laudani, ‘Mestieri di donne, mestieri di uomini: le corporazioni in età moderna’, in Angela Groppi (ed.), Il lavoro delle donne (Rome: Laterza, 1996), 183–205. Catherine C. Simon-Muscheid, ‘La lutte des maîtres tisserands contre les tisserandes à Bâle. La condition féminine au XV siècle’, in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (Florence: Le Monnier, 1990), 383–89; Anna Bellavitis, ‘Donne, cittadinanza e corporazioni tra Medioevo ed età moderna: ricerche in corso’, in Nadia M. Filippini, Tiziana Plebani and Anna Scattigno (eds.), Corpi e storia. Donne e uomini dal mondo antico all’età contemporanea (Rome: Viella, 2002), 87–104. Vicente Valentín, ‘Mujeres artesanas’; Marta Vicente Valentín, ‘Images and realities of work: Women and guilds in early modern Barcelona’, in Magdalena S. Sánchez and Alain Saint Saëns (eds.), Spanish Women in the Golden Age (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 127–39. González Athenas, ‘Legal regulations’; Luciana Morassi, ‘La donna nell’economia friulana tra Patriarcato e Repubblica’, in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII– XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (Florence: Le Monnier, 1990), 329–44; Dora Dumont, ‘Women and guilds in Bologna: The ambiguities of “marginality”’, Radical History Review 70 (1998), 4–25.

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Rome, when a group of seamstresses was the object of complaints raised by the guild of tailors, who accused them of illegally practising their craft and of competing with them. Accused of keeping apprentices and workers, the seamstresses replied that these were relatives who helped out so as not to remain idle and run the risk of ending up ‘on the game’. In front of the tailors’ guild’s court, the seamstresses asserted their right to sew and make clothes, stating that it was certainly not illegal work for the open market, but, on the contrary, their normal activity as mothers within their families. The argument must have been persuasive, as they were able to avoid joining the guild. Their position in the corporate system was clearly disadvantaged though: if they had joined the guild, they would have had to pay registration fees and submit to the control of the corporate hierarchies without ever being able to play a role of power. By offering lower prices, however, they competed with the production organized by master tailors who, for this reason, tried to fight them. Appealing to family roles, the code of women’s honour and establishing themselves as guardians of the virtue of the young women of the neighbourhood was a clever way of using certain gender stereotypes to their advantage.75 The production of craft guilds was in fact largely based on the work of female workers. They were often organized by other women, called mistresses even if they were not members of the guild, as was the case in the woollen production in Padua,76 as well as in the silk production in Venice.77 This was also the case in the industry of the glass beads of Venice and Murano, that were exported and used as currency in the African market of slaves sent to the American colonies. In 1741, the hierarchies of the bead-makers’ guild reported ‘two women of Greek nationality’ for buying large quantities of beads ‘at a very low price’ from threaders and giving them out to be worked with by other women, then selling the artefacts to merchants ‘as if they were legitimate master craftsmen’.78 The tendency of guilds to marginalize women’s work, however, gave rise in many cases to compensatory tactics on the part of female workers in the form of illegal activity and fraud on raw materials. In the Venetian silk industry, silk thread stolen from the silk merchants was used to produce a wide range of light fabrics, which competed with the authorized production of veils and other types of small-size fabrics manufactured by mixing the scraps with silk thread.79 In Lyon, female spinners would hold back part of the raw silk 75 76 77 78 79

Angela Groppi, ‘A matter of fact rather than principle: Women, work and property in papal Rome (eighteenth–nineteenth Centuries)’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 7:1 (2002), 37–55. Andrea Caracausi, Dentro la bottega. Culture del lavoro in una città dell’Europa moderna (Marsilio: Venezia, 2008). Molà, ‘Le donne nell’industria serica’. Francesca Trivellato, Fondamenta dei vetrai. Lavoro, tecnologia e mercato a Venezia tra Sei e Settecento (Rome: Donzelli, 2000), 181. Molà, ‘Le donne nell’industria serica’.

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received from the masters, wetting or greasing the yarn they returned, in order to achieve the same weight as the raw material they had been given. The stolen silk was then worked by the spinners themselves at home: they thus turned into mistresses running completely illegal workshops. Similar behaviours were frequently reported by other guilds that used silk, such as the hatters or the button-makers but, in this last case, the guild ended up accepting women as mistresses, preferring open and legal competition.80 It is important to stress that those illicit trades, a safety net in the ‘economy of makeshifts’ among the poorer social classes, added a fundamental contribution to the household budget in periods of crisis.81 The thriving Parisian fashion industry of the eighteenth century also offered many opportunities for work, both inside and outside the guilds, be they male guilds, like the mercers and the tailors, or female guilds, like the seamstresses. There was nothing secret about ‘clandestine’ labour in the garment industry and it was impossible to disentangle guild from clandestine production.82 Selling and Smuggling Guilds in the retail sector are generally considered more open to women, especially as they did not require long apprenticeships and specific qualifications. Nevertheless, in Leipzig, from 1604, formal education (‘apprentice and service years’) became a necessary precondition to enter the shopkeepers’ guild: women’s lack of these requirements provided the shopkeepers with an opportunity to refuse women’s admission.83 In the Dutch cities, membership of guilds in the retail trade was not so easy to obtain, as it was subject to possession of citizenship and the payment of high registration fees.84 In Krakow, Potznan and Warsaw, women selling on the city markets had autonomous organizations.85 This was also the case in Madrid, where, from the seventeenth century, there existed a guild of female sellers of tripe and giblets at the city meat market. In fact, in spite of its name (gremio de mondogueras) it was a mixed organization, including married couples, widows and single women.86 In eighteenth-century Toulouse, there was an organized female trade of second-hand clothing sellers: in 1756, two thirds of the members were 80 82 83

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81 Hafter, ‘Stratégies’. Montenach, ‘Coping’. Judith G. Coffin, The Politics of Women’s Work: The Paris Garment Trades, 1750–1915 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Susanne Schötz, ‘Female traders and practices of illicit exchange: Observations on Leipzig’s retail trade between the sixteenth and nineteenth century’, in Thomas Buchner and Philip R. Hoffmann-Rehnitz (eds.), Shadow Economies and Irregular Work in Urban Europe (Wien, Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011), 127–40. Danielle van den Heuvel, ‘Policing peddlers: The prosecution of illegal street trade in eighteenth-century Dutch towns’, Historical Journal 58:2 (2015), 367–92. 86 Karpinski, ‘Women’. López Barahona, Las Trabajadoras.

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married and about one in seven were widows, while in the retail trade the proportion of widows was about 10 per cent. From 1770, men also entered this organized profession that was headed by a woman.87 Some women were the official suppliers of important institutions, monasteries or city councils, others were black marketeers who had no license or authorization, against whom the city authorities and the guilds fought relentlessly.88 In early modern Barcelona, unlicensed saleswomen, not belonging to any guild and called regatonas, were opposed by both the city authorities, who in 1734 sought, apparently without success, to force them to join the traders’ guild, and by the licensed saleswomen who, in 1769, reacted to the imposition of a penalty for trading on the public square by denouncing the many unlicensed itinerant traders, to whom, they said, the city authorities were not paying enough attention.89 Retail trade was in fact organized according to a complicated, hierarchical system of rights, and some women were persecuted and punished as ‘criminals’, because they had infringed retail legislation by using false measurements and weights or selling goods they were not authorized to sell. They were often legally working in retail but tried to expand the limited rights that applied to them, combining both official and non-official businesses.90 A typical female occupation in the cities was the resale of second-hand goods: they could be clothes, possibly repaired or transformed according to fashion by expert ‘clandestine’ seamstresses, and of course they could also be stolen goods. In Paris, women who went to people’s houses to sell second-hand clothes and jewellery were often involved in the clandestine sale of smuggled or illegally imported goods such as fabrics from the Indies, painted canvas, Flanders lace and so forth, either on their own account or acting on behalf of someone else.91 Anne Montenach has highlighted the central role played by female smugglers at the time of mercantilism. A predominantly masculine activity when transporting prohibited goods from one country to another, smuggling became a mainly feminine activity when it came to moving around the city and selling on goods that had entered the country illegally. In some cases, judicial sources reveal the existence of organized networks, within 87 88

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Georges Hanne, ‘L’enregistrement des occupations à l’épreuve du genre: Toulouse, vers 1770–1821’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 54:1 (2007), 69–97. Beverly Lemire, The Business of Everyday Life: Gender, Practice and Social Politics in England, c.1600–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); David Pennington, Going to Market. Women, Trade and Social Relations in Early Modern English Towns, c.1550–1650 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). 90 Vicente Valentín, ‘Mujeres artesanas’. Schötz, ‘Female traders’. Laurence Fontaine, ‘The exchange of second-hand goods between survival strategies and “business” in eighteenth-century Paris’, in Laurence Fontaine (ed.), Alternative Exchanges: Second-hand Circulations from the Sixteenth Century to the Present (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 97–114.

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which roving female traders, seamstresses or landladies of inns and taverns played central roles.92 Female street vendors were also a familiar presence in the cities, but, at the same time, in many parts of Europe, the ancient and deep-rooted identification of public space as a male space also translated into specific behaviours and prohibitions. From Catania to London: ‘women’s presence in certain spaces and times could be readily construed as disorderly’.93 In her recent survey of European guilds, Sheilagh Ogilvie asks two interesting questions: ‘Did guilds create a good economic position for women despite or even because of gender-based rules?’ and ‘Can good black markets replace bad formal institutions?’ She answers negatively to both questions, on the basis of a very large survey of the international bibliography on the subject.94 Her conclusions are certainly right, but they raise another question, that is: why did the organization of production that was so unfavourable to women workers endure for centuries and how did it evolve over time and in relation to economic changes? Many factors come into play in urban economies, determining a subtle game of balances between different institutions and between structured, regulated and organized work and irregular work, which was not necessarily ‘black’, illegal or clandestine.95 Conclusion: Resources, Rights and the Challenge of Comparison In 1520, the legacy of Marina de Casanis, ‘a small and fat woman, about sixty years old’, was the subject of a conflict between Antonia of Vicenza and the Venetian Judges who had the task of recovering, for the benefit of the state, heritages that no one had claimed. Among the witnesses there were three patrician men and three women who lived with the deceased. Faced with the Judges who accused the women of being public prostitutes, the witnesses affirmed that Marina was ‘an honest and kind person who knew how to work the canvas and the sheet well, who knew how to sew and mend and that it is for

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Anne Montenach, ‘Genre, prohibition et commerce de détail. Les femmes et la circulation des indiennes en Lyonnais et Dauphiné (1686–1759)’, in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.) Il commercio al minuto. Domanda e offerta tra economia formale e informale, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studio dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2015), 113–30. Laudani, ‘Mestieri di donne’; Laura Gowing, ‘The freedom of the streets’: Women and social space, 1560–1640’, in Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner (eds.), Londinopolis; Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 130–52, 138. Ogilvie, European Guilds, 234. Thomas Buchner and Philip R. Hoffmann-Rehnitz (eds.), Shadow Economies and Irregular Work in Urban Europe (Wien, Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011).

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this reason that good people frequented her house’.96 It was very easy to discredit a group of women who lived together, accusing them of prostitution, especially if these women turned out to have contacts with members of the elite. Research has highlighted a growing distrust of society and institutions towards unmarried working women in specific contexts, like early modern Germany, but other research, particularly on the Netherlands, has highlighted a context of greater tolerance.97 In some way, these different perceptions of societies about unmarried women could also be related to their different status in legal systems. In the Roman legal tradition, all the children, male or female, were under the patria potestas until their father’s death, while in many European customary systems, as in England, northern France or the Netherlands, unmarried adult women had control over their economic activities. The question of the economic rights that women could have in the different European legal systems is fundamental to understanding what possibilities for action were offered to them in urban spaces. Amy L. Erickson has suggested a link between the capitalist development of the English economy and the investment activities of unmarried women, widows who had successfully gained title to their husbands’ inheritances and husbands who could freely access both their own and their wives’ assets, under the legal regime of ‘coverture’.98 More recently, a link has been suggested between the egalitarian inheritance custom of the Netherlands that gave to children of both sexes equal rights to inheritance and to both spouses equal responsibilities in making a living and the economic development of that region in the early modern period.99 However, the conclusion that, on the contrary, the dowry-based legal systems of ius commune, inherited from Roman law, and the separation of property between spouses were less favourable to women’s work and to the development of women’s economic activities seems questionable. Research has in fact demonstrated that, even in Italy and more generally in southern Europe, in the working classes, both men and women had to work, before and after marriage, and indeed the fact that the dowry, at least in theory, was indispensable to marriage, encouraged girls without an inheritance to leave the family and to emigrate to the cities to find work in crafts or as servants, as the 96 97

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Venice State Archives, Giudici dell’Esaminador, Esami e testamenti rilevati per breviario, b. 8, fasc. 4, 1520. De Groot, Devos and Schmidt, Single Life and the City; Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (eds.), Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 192–216; Jeannette Kamp, ‘Female crime and household control in early modern Frankfurt am Main’, History of the Family 21:4 (2016), 531–50. Amy L. Erickson, ‘Coverture and capitalism’, History Workshop Journal 59 (2005), 1–16. Jan Luiten van Zanden, Tine De Moor and Sarah Carmichael, Capital Women: The European Marriage Pattern, Female Empowerment, and Economic Development in Western Europe, 1300–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

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bride’s dowry was indispensable to marriage.100 However, even in the Parisian custom, where both sons and daughters were endowed at the time of marriage, the contribution of the brides in the artisan families was greater to compensate for the fact that their wages would be lower: the inheritance system was egalitarian but the bride’s investment was greater than that of the groom.101 In sixteenth century Venice, a servant would have had to work for 20 years to raise a dowry solely from the fruits of her labour.102 The same was true for a female worker in Lyon silk manufacturing in the eighteenth century.103 To this paradoxical situation, which potentially risked delaying the marriages of the working classes indefinitely, various solutions were given, such as institutions in which young women were taught a trade, while at the same time allowing them to set aside the sum needed to constitute a dowry. A dowry could be made up of working tools, raw materials and be the starting point of a workshop, a commercial activity, an enterprise.104 The right of widows to retrieve their dowry or the equivalent amount was protected by law: they could then start a new activity, as many did in sixteenth-century Venice.105 One of the paradoxes of early modern economies, when viewed from a gender perspective, is the contradiction between discrimination against women, at all levels, and the vital need to guarantee them some spaces of economic autonomy in order to make society work. In the early modern period, European cities offered new and interesting possibilities of work, personal affirmation and gain to specific groups of women but family relationships continued to play a decisive role in the opportunities that women had to access roles of responsibility and work in particular trades. These are nonlinear processes, just as the economic cycles of European cities were nonlinear. Given the ubiquity of women’s work in early modern European cities, what, then, changes in our understanding of urban markets when we no longer consider women’s presence as exceptional, casual or episodic? While many legal rules, inheritance customs, guilds and municipal regulations, written or 100 101

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Zucca Micheletto, ‘Reconsidering the southern European model’. Janine Lanza, ‘Women, law and business formation in early modern Paris’, in Anna Bellavitis and Beatrice Zucca Micheletto (eds.), Gender, Law and Economic Well-Being in Europe from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century. North versus South? (London: Routledge 2019), 242–53. Dennis Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft: Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice, 1400–1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Maurice Garden, Lyon et les Lyonnais au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1970). Beatrice Zucca Micheletto, ‘Only unpaid labour force? Women’s and girls’ work and property in family business in early modern Italy, History of the Family 19:3 (2014), 323–40. Emilie Fiorucci, ‘Women at work in a southern European town: Women, guilds and commercial partnerships in Venice in the sixteenth century’, in Anna Bellavitis and Beatrice Zucca Micheletto (eds.), Gender, Law and Economic Well-Being in Europe from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century. North versus South? (London: Routledge 2019), 215–27.

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unwritten laws existed to prevent, if not exclude women from the most prestigious and most remunerated activities, the presence of women in urban economies was not exceptional but a necessary structure of the labour markets. Laws authorizing widows to take over their husband’s activity recognized years of joint work and therefore de facto co-management of the workshop, even while almost always involving clauses limiting their freedom of action. Laws authorizing married women to pursue autonomous economic activities, in contexts where – with no exception – wives were under the control of their husbands, recognized the necessity of their contribution to urban economies. Regulations of urban guilds or municipal authorities that allowed women’s work (in derogation of other norms) in specific circumstances such as the need to relaunch production, control the workforce or avoid overburdening welfare facilities, reflect a reality: the necessity of women’s work for the market and at the same time the will to keep it in a state of subordination. It is a contradiction that underlies the economies – not only urban ones – of the early modern period and which I believe has very few exceptions. Even where the laws were more favourable to women, as in the Netherlands, the market kept their wages low, or women were banned de facto from the more remunerating stages of production, in order to reaffirm the hierarchy that privileged male household heads.106 Women found their spaces of autonomy and action within structures that were not in their favour, by claiming organizational status, as did the hacklers of Gouda, or by refusing to submit to guilds, like the seamstresses of Rome, or by finding resources illegally. Cities offered opportunities and risks, institutions hindered or protected, economic conditions and legal regulations facilitated or blocked actions and initiatives. In cities, rights could be ‘acted upon’, but nothing is simple or linear: not the supposed decline of women’s economic activities in the early modern age, compared to a supposed medieval ‘golden age’; not a supposed radical opposition between North and South or between Catholics and Protestants. The purpose of this chapter is to emphasize the activities of the female part of urban populations, but it is clear that a global vision should not exclude the male part of the population, as even for male workers the urban labour market could be uncertain, precarious and violent. Only an all-round look at urban economies, including all their components, can allow us to shed light on the real functioning of the European societies of the past.

106

Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, ‘Segmentation in the pre-Industrial labour market: Women’s work in the Dutch textile industry, 1581–1810’, International Review of Social History 51:2 (2006), 189–216.

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6

Migration Amy Louise Erickson and Ariadne Schmidt

Introduction Since the 1970s, historians have repeatedly demonstrated that, far from being stable and static, early modern European societies were highly mobile, even where regulations aimed to control the workforce, and to some extent even in the areas characterized by serfdom. Much research on early modern population movement is about male labour migration, notably journeymen, soldiers, sailors and vagrants within Europe. These men are relatively easy to count in the historical record, thanks to guild, military and judicial records, but this framework has made it difficult for historians to ‘see’ female migration. When assessing the economic implications of migration and mobility, gender is notable for its absence as a category of analysis in the existing literature. The economic meaning of ‘migrants’ as workers or potential workers has usually been reserved for men. Even today, it is possible to write about migrants as if they were overwhelmingly male until the end of the nineteenth century: overviews and handbooks of migration history may merely mention women, and gender is not integrated into macro-narratives.1 The ‘gender turn’ in migration history has focused exclusively on the modern period and on international migrants. But for the early modern period, when migration meant simply movement away from one’s birthplace, articles on individual locations with particularly detailed records identifying migrants in the pre-1800 period have appeared in sufficient numbers over the past four decades to warrant a rethinking of movement and labour in early modern Europe. While many people moved for religious motives and to escape war, the great majority of migration was for work, and even those who moved for other reasons had to work wherever they arrived. Our meta-study of existing research from a comparative perspective critically examines the common 1

For example, Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, ‘The mobility transition revisited, 1500–1900: What the case of Europe can offer to global history’, Journal of Global History 4:3 (2009), 347–77. Klaus J. Bade, Pieter C. Emmer, Leo Lucassen and Jochen Oltmer (eds.), The Encyclopedia of European Migration and Minorities from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

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categories and focusses on the economic impact of gendered patterns of migration, specifically from rural areas to cities. Substantial migration also occurred within rural areas of Europe and outwards to new Atlantic and Indian Ocean colonies, but we cannot cover these movements in the current study. In most cities in western Europe by 1700, women outnumbered men. This imbalance could only have resulted from migration: either women immigrating or men emigrating. Migration thus affected sex ratios, which affected and reflected urban labour markets. This chapter examines the evidence on migration and labour, in light of gender. We start by assessing existing work on population movements in various geographical contexts in early modern Europe. We first look critically at existing approaches to and categories of migration, then at the sources used for the early modern period and finally at specific findings for the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in terms of proportions of migrants, sex ratios and employment. In the early modern period, citizenship and ‘belonging’ were defined locally. We therefore take a broad definition of migration to mean the movements of people from one locality to another, whether cross-cultural or not.2 Categorizing Types of Migrations, Motives and Migrants Migration covers a range of movements by different types of individuals leaving home for a variety of reasons. Migration history ‘is still far from unified, due to the tendency to make fundamental distinctions between different types of migrations’.3 While this tendency to make distinctions and to categorize types of migration, migrants and motives characterizes the research field, it is remarkable that the category of gender is not incorporated systematically in migrant history of the early modern period. The most basic axes along which scholars categorize migration in early modern societies are short-distance versus long-distance and permanent versus temporary migration.4 Migration is usually classified into four types, all of which have their own gender-related characteristics.5 Local migration – from 2 3

4

5

Patrick Manning, Migration in World History (London: Routledge, 2005), 6–7. See also Lucassen and Lucassen, ‘Mobility transition revisited’, 351. Jan Lucassen, Leo Lucassen and Patrick Manning, ‘Migration history: Multidisciplinary approaches’, in Jan Lucassen, Leo Lucassen and Patrick Manning (eds.), Migration History in World History. Multidisciplinary Approaches (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 8. Cf Bert De Munck and Anne Winter, ‘Regulating migration in early modern cities: An introduction’, in Bert De Munck and Anne Winter (eds.), Gated Communities? Regulating Migration in Early Modern Cities (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 1–24, 4. Charles Tilly, ‘Migration in modern European history’, in William H. McNeill and Ruth S. Adams (eds.), Human Migration: Patterns and Policies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 48–72; Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since

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one village to another – includes the systems that moved people in their home market, a marriage market, land market or labour market.6 Circular migration, for example, transhumance, harvest work, servants being sent out and other forms of seasonal migration, was part of employment patterns designed to eke out the family economy or to relieve short-term imbalances in the labour market.7 Driven by work opportunities, this type of migration was highly sex-selective and, apart from agricultural service, was often either all-male or all-female, depending on the occupation.8 In chain migration,9 sex selectivity could change over time, with single men making quarters and wives or whole families following them in time.10 And in career migration the needs and the geography of the hiring institution determined the timing and direction of the migration. The broadening scope of research, geographically and otherwise, resulted in attention for other categories such as coerced, colonizing and collective migrations.11 The majority of European migrations were voluntary, but the stark dichotomy between forced and free migration does not accurately characterize the prevalence of poverty and the economic necessity to find work elsewhere. The choice may have been who in the family was going to leave, rather than whether or not to migrate.12 The axes along which historians have categorized groups of migrants relate to their reception in the new community. Humble servants, apprentices and children from the elites engaged in what is sometimes described as ‘betterment migration’ and came from nearby.13 The very poor (‘subsistence migrants’), the very wealthy and refugees were three groups distinguished among the long-distance migrants. Foreignness, in the meaning of a non-native status, cultural distance or ‘otherness’, was not always decisive for the reception of

6 7 9 10 11 12

13

1650, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). Lucassen and Lucassen recently concluded that this variety is still often overlooked by migration historians working on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who largely focus on one-way settlers. Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, ‘Theorizing cross-cultural migrations: The case of Eurasia since 1500’, Social Science History 41 (2017), 445–75, 447. Peter Clark and David Souden, ‘Introduction’, in Peter Clark and David Souden (eds.), Migration and Society in Early Modern England (London: Hutchinson, 1987), 11–48, 16. 8 Clark and Souden, ‘Introduction’, 17. Tilly, ‘Migration in modern European history’, 55. Tilly, ‘Migration in modern European history’; Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 17. Tilly, ‘Migration in modern European history’, 55. Page Moch mentions these as the fifth and sixth categories, albeit without discussing them extensively in her book. Page Moch, Moving Europeans, 17. Dirk Hoerder, Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, ‘Terminologies and concepts of migration research’, in Klaus J. Bade, Pieter C. Emmer, Leo Lucassen and Jochen Oltmer (eds.), The Encyclopedia of European Migration and Minorities from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), xxv–xxxix, xxvi. Page Moch, Moving Europeans, 47.

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migrants; rather, the contribution of newcomers to the local economy determined who was welcome and who was not.14 The categorization of the types of migrants overlaps with the motives to move, that are traditionally divided in the simplified, and also criticized, ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors.15 Political repression and war, religious persecution and structural or temporal subsistence insecurity pushed people to move. Better conditions drew political and religious refugees, (seasonal) labour migrants and passers-by to towns: religious freedom, employment, higher wages and access to institutions.16 It is obvious that these push and pull factors were not mutually exclusive. Refugees chose destinations where they would be able to make a living and market their skills and human capital.17 In addition to this individually motivated migration, there were the movements in planned migration schemes and in forced migration. The wish of authorities to expel certain groups was one of the push factors, such as with the Huguenot emigration of 50,000 protestants from France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Pull factors could be the aim to provide new colonial settlements with labour, sometimes in the form of brides. Whether driven by political, religious or economic motives, all of these movements had implications for the local labour markets of both sending and receiving regions. When it comes to economic development, the classifications that distinguish different economic sectors where migrants work are important. Movements of migrants between different economic sectors were both driven by, and caused, structural economic changes. The loss of land and growing wage dependency from the sixteenth century forced people out of agrarian work, forming a labour reservoir available for other economic sectors. The development of proto-industry, and of a service sector in towns, influenced where people moved from and to.18 A further refinement, related to the motives to migrate, is the classification that distinguishes between different types of towns attracting migrants. General patterns of migration to early modern cities were characterized by a

14

15

16 17 18

See, for example, Eleonora Canepari, ‘Who is not welcome? Reception and rejection of migrants in early modern Italian cities’, in Bert De Munck and Anne Winter (eds.), Gated Communities? Regulating Migration in Early Modern Cities (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 101–16. Hoerder, Lucassen and Lucassen, ‘Terminologies and concepts of migration research’, xxvii. For a discussion of the push-pull model, see Anne Winter, Migrants and Urban Change: Newcomers to Antwerp, 1760–1860 (London: Routledge, 2009), 10–13. Jan Lucassen and Rinus Penninx, Nieuwkomers, nakomelingen, Nederlanders. Immigranten in Nederland 1550–1993 (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis 1999), 29–30. Lucassen and Penninx, Nieuwkomers, nakomelingen, Nederlanders, 29; Lucassen, Lucassen and Manning, Migration History, 9. Hoerder, Lucassen and Lucassen, ‘Terminologies and concepts of migration research’, xxx.

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high turnover, intense local migration, long-distance migration and circular and career movements, in spite of the fact that all of these cities were different. There existed a wide range of patterns, depending upon the different urban economies and historical circumstances.19 There were capital cities; there were towns that attracted newcomers with their local industries, or with their functions as provincial capitals; and there were towns that suffered from demographic stagnation or lost population. A systematic analysis of female migration along such a typology of towns has not been made but could be very fruitful. The gendered segmentation of the labour market drew different groups of people and can explain the volume and the direction of migration of women and men. Whatever their motives were, migrants were normal in early modern society, and in many cities they either equalled or even outnumbered the localborn. Whether pushed or pulled, the majority of the migrants, men and women, had to maintain themselves with work. As migration-flows among cities and between urban and rural sectors were ‘the linchpin of the urban economy’, a gender-inclusive approach to migration is necessary to fully understand early modern urban economies.20 Gender as a Category In the classifications used to understand early modern migration, attention has nominally been paid to women, but gender is rarely included systematically as a category of analysis.21 In addition, the representation of the early modern female migrant is stereotypical: women are usually portrayed as shortdistance migrants moving to towns in search of work as servants or migrating because of family concerns and as followers of men.22 Unquestionably, the 19 20 21

22

Page Moch, Moving Europeans, 50, 47–48. Jan de Vries, European Urbanization 1500–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 200. The exceptions mentioned by Page Moch all focus on the modern period. Leslie Page Moch, ‘Introduction’, in Dirk Hoerder and Leslie Page Moch, European Migrants. Global and Local Perspectives (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996), 3–18, 17, note 30. See also Raingard Esser, ‘Out of sight and on the margins? Migrating women in early modern Europe’, in F. Reid and K. Holden (eds.), Women on the Move: Refugees, Migration and Exile (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010), 9–20. For example: Peter Clark, ‘Introduction’, in Peter Clark (ed.), The Transformation of English Provincial Towns 1600–1800 (London: Hutchinson, 1984), 13–61, 18; Leslie Page Moch, ‘The European perspective: Changing conditions and multiple migrations’, in Dirk Hoerder and Leslie Page Moch (eds.), European Migrants. Global and Local Perspectives (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996), 115–40, 117; Adam Crymble, Adam Dennett and Tim Hitchcock, ‘Modelling regional imbalances in English plebeian migration to late eighteenthcentury London’, Economic History Review 71:3 (2018), 747–71, 763. Two exceptions to this rule, who acknowledge that towns’ specialization in industry and commerce, as well as services specifically attracted women, are Sheilagh Ogilvie and Jeremy Edwards, ‘Women and the “second serfdom”: Evidence from early modern Bohemia’, Journal of Economic History 60:4

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migration experiences of women were much more diverse and dominated by the need to find work. Many young women as life-cycle migrants moved to towns to find positions as servants and possibly marriage partners. But the fact that the ‘domestic servant’ exemplifies the female labour migrant in historical research is not only because of their numbers. Other kinds of female labour migrants do not figure prominently in historical studies. Page Moch attributed the under-representation of women in studies on labour migration partly to the lack of sources on women’s work and partly ‘because women were less likely than men to be labour migrants’.23 But equally important is that men are more easily identified as labour migrants, partly due to the focus of historians on occupations. Female servants receive most attention because this occupation was highly recognizable, traceable in many historical sources and relatively easy to quantify. But the urban labour market depended upon female migrants in a much wider variety of employment and, as we will show, at least half of early modern labour migrants appear to have been women. Next to servants, female migrants are often presented as followers of men. Certainly, decisions about women’s migration were sometimes made in a family context.24 But two qualifications are important here. First, men also made decisions to migrate within the context of family strategies. Secondly, the focus on women migrating within a family context should not obscure their economic roles. Married women worked as well as unmarried, and nearly all women exercised important economic roles in the family context.25 It has been claimed that, before the twentieth century, almost all decisions to migrate were made within the family context, more specifically within the family economy. In decisions to leave, income-generating capabilities according to gender and age were considered in relation to the family needs.26 Women’s ‘capacity for reproduction’ distinguished their migration,27 but their experiences were

23 24

25

26

27

(2000), 961–94, 966; and Pamela Sharpe, ‘Population and society 1700–1840’, in Peter Clark (ed.), Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol 2: 1540–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 491–528, 499–500. Page Moch, Moving Europeans, 203. Christiane Harzig, ‘Women migrants as global and local agents: New research strategies on gender and migration’, in Pamela Sharpe (ed.), Women, Gender and Labour Migration. Historical and Global Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2001), 15–28, 23. Manuela Martini and Anna Bellavitis, ‘Introduction. Household economies, social norms and practices of unpaid market work in Europe from the sixteenth century to the present’, History of the Family 19:3 (2014), 273–82. Hoerder, Lucassen and Lucassen, ‘Terminologies and concepts of migration research’, xxvii, argue that only men and women who broke the rules and were banished did not make their decisions in family context. Page Moch, ‘Introduction’, 11.

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shaped both by their reproductive and their productive roles.28 Looking at migration from the perspective of family strategies has yielded insight into the economic role of women in the migration process, as leavers, stayers and as intermediaries.29 The space between the sending and receiving society formed an important field of economic activity for women who were, for example, indispensable in building the networks between home and far away.30 So, it is true that women, like men, often migrated in a family context, but that does not mean that they were economically inactive. The decision to migrate was economic, yet it is difficult to assess the connection between income and migration. It is tempting to see the gendered nature of migration as a function of perceived profitability. The general assumption is that, because men could earn more, it was more profitable for men to migrate than for women. When female migrants equalled or outnumbered male migrants it is supposed that this was profitable for families because women sent more money home. However, access to resources, to the labour market or to networks were gendered as well – which complicates the costbenefit approach of the explanation of migration in terms of profitability.31 That gender is not systematically incorporated as a category of analysis in the examination of migration is remarkable because of ‘all the individual characteristics that influence the migration experience, gender is perhaps the most fundamental’.32 Gender roles had an impact on decisions to migrate and, equally, roles changed under the influence of migration, for both those who moved and those who stayed behind. Women’s migration experiences were different from men’s, yet their movements were also inextricably interconnected.33 The characterization of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the age of ‘feminization of migration’ has obscured the importance of female migration in the early modern period. The emergence of a process of feminization of migration has been debated.34 Schrover found that ‘feminization’ is 28 29

30 31 32 33 34

Page Moch, Moving Europeans, 14. Jan Kok, ‘The family factor in migration decisions’, in Jan Lucassen, Leo Lucassen and Patrick Manning (eds.), Migration History in World History (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 213–50; Carmen Sarasúa, ‘Leaving home to help the family? Male and female temporary migrants in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Spain’, in Pamela Sharpe (ed.), Women, Gender and Labour Migration. Historical and Global Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2001), 29–59. See also the section in this chapter, ‘Gender and Work in Sending Regions’. Susannah Shaw Romney, New Netherland Connections. Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). Marlou Schrover, ‘Labour migration’, in Karin Hofmeester and Marcel van der Linden (eds.), Handbook Global History of Work (Oldenbourg: De Gruyter, 2017), 433–68, 449. Page Moch, Moving Europeans, 14; Page Moch, ‘Introduction’, 10. Page Moch, Moving Europeans, 14. J. Trent Alexander and Annemarie Steidl, ‘Gender and the “laws of migration”: A reconsideration of nineteenth-century patterns’, Social Science History 36:2 (2012), 225–27; Marlou Schrover, ‘Feminization and problematization of migration: Europe in the

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sometimes used to indicate a point at which women began to outnumber men or equal men; in other cases, it indicates an assumed increase in the longdistance migration of women, compared to the short-distance migration in the past; and sometimes the term refers to an increase in the number of pioneering women and single migrants, as opposed to the assumption that women were dependent migrants before.35 The claim of a consistent trend of feminization has been challenged with evidence on male and female migration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.36 Evidence from earlier periods can be added to correct the assumption that female migration was a modern phenomenon. In the early modern period migration was experienced by more than half the population in many places, and it appears to have been at least half female. Sources The population censuses available generally from the mid-nineteenth century mean that historians pay more attention to the migration of women in the modern period. Considerable emphasis is placed on gender in at least some contemporary studies of migration, often using oral histories and policy studies.37 Using census returns to establish the character and extent of women’s work patterns has been shown to be problematic,38 but for

35 36

37

38

nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, in Dirk Hoerder and Amarjit Kaur (eds.), Proletarian and Gendered Mass Migrations: A Global Perspective on Continuities and Discontinuities from the 19th to the 21st Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 103–31. Schrover, ‘Feminization and problematization’, especially 104. Schrover concludes that overall percentages remained more or less equal and that the idea of feminization springs from the fact that more attention is paid to the migration of women, from campaigns of migrant women to obtain equal rights and from the fact that ‘problems’ in countries of origin and settlement are linked to the feminization of migration. Schrover, ‘Feminization and problematization’, 130–31. See also Katharine M. Donato, Joseph T. Alexander, Donna R. Gabaccia and Johanna Leinonen, ‘Variations in the gender composition of immigrant populations: How they matter’, International Migration Review 45:3 (2011), 495–526. For example, Eleonore Kofman, Annie Phizacklea, Parvati Raghuram and Rosemary Sales, Gender and International Migration in Europe: Employment, Welfare and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000) in a series titled ‘Gender, Racism, Ethnicity’, and Laura Oso and Natalia Ribas-Mateos (eds.), The International Handbook on Gender, Migration and Transnationalism: Global and Development Perspectives (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2013) in a series titled ‘International Handbooks on Gender’. Jane Humphries and Carmen Sarasúa, ‘Off the record: Reconstructing women’s labor force participation in the European past’, Feminist Economics 18:4 (2012), 39–67; Ariadne Schmidt and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, ‘Reconsidering the “first male-breadwinner economy”: Women’s labor force participation in the Netherlands, 1600–1900’, Feminist Economics 18:4 (2012), 69–96; Beatrice Zucca Micheletto, ‘Reconsidering women’s labor force participation rates in eighteenth-century Turin’, Feminist Economics 19:4 (2013), 200–23. For a later period, see Amanda Wilkinson, ‘The census enumeration of women working in the Courtauld silk

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establishing place of origin censuses are more straightforward. The early modern period has few censuses and few sources which systematically identified migrants of both sexes. Historians have regularly relied on registers of taxation, citizenship, apprenticeship or the military, which record only or overwhelmingly men.39 But early modern sources are available which can illuminate, first, the proportion of migrants in a population and, secondly, the relative proportions of women and men among those migrants. The unique 1802 census of French territory survives in some nominative lists, recording urban populations with origins, and has been analysed for two cities: in Rheims, 36 per cent of adult women and 34 per cent of men were immigrants;40 in Turin, 40 per cent of women (aged 15–40) and 60 per cent of men (aged 26–60) were immigrants.41 The poorest sections of urban populations were more likely to be enumerated in the records of civic or charitable poor relief. Table 6.1 sets out the proportions of migrants among the poor in four cities. In 1570, Norwich conducted a survey of the English poor, of whom more than half were not native to the city. Dutch and Walloon immigrants constituted perhaps 28 per cent of the city’s population, but they were responsible for relieving their own poor so were not enumerated in the city’s survey.42 In Amsterdam, the Almoners were established to support noncitizens who had been Amsterdam residents for at least three years. In 1614, no less than 90 per cent of the 2,500 families receiving support was born not merely outside Amsterdam but outside the Dutch Republic.43 In Rome around

39

40

41

42

43

mills, 1851–1901’, Local Population Studies 85 (2010), 64–71. Higgs and Wilkinson revisited the issue and concluded that the problems with the nineteenth-century censuses for the analysis of women’s employment, ‘do not necessarily invalidate their use’. Edward Higgs and Amanda Wilkinson, ‘Women, occupations and work in the Victorian censuses revisited’, History Workshop Journal 81:1 (2016), 17–38, 34. Recent studies may continue to pay little or no attention to women, e.g., Alexia Grosjean and Steve Murdoch (eds.), Scottish Communities Abroad in the Early Modern Period (Leiden: Brill, 2005). Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux, ‘The importance of women in an urban environment: The example of the Rheims household at the beginning of the industrial revolution’, in Richard Wall (ed.), Family Forms in Historic Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 475–92, 478. Beatrice Zucca Micheletto, ‘La migration comme processus: dynamiques, patrimoniales er parcours d’installation des immigrés’, Annales de Demographie Historique 124:2 (2012), 43–64, 46. The survey covered 2,360 people in total, but only household heads’ origins were noted and only one third of the 800 heads of household included a place of origin. Margaret Pelling, The Common Lot. Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (London: Longman, 1998), 68–69. Leo Lucassen, ‘Cities, states and migration control in western Europe: Comparing then and now’, in Bert De Munck and Anne Winter (eds.), Gated Communities? Regulating Migration in Early Modern Cities (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 217–40, 227. See also Erika Kuijpers,

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Table 6.1. Proportion of migrants among the urban poor in early modern Europe Place

Period a

Norwich

Source

1570

Census of poor: household heads 1614 Institution of the Almoners Amsterdamb 1694–1701 Hospital records Romec London (Westminster)d 1774–1781 Hospital doctor’s case notes

Number

% migrant

264

>50

2,500 families 500 3,236

90 75 73

Sources: a Margaret Pelling, The Common Lot. Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (London: Longman, 1998), 68–69. b Leo Lucassen, ‘Cities, states and migration control in Western Europe: Comparing then and now’, in Bert De Munck and Anne Winter (eds.), Gated Communities? Regulating Migration in Early Modern Cities (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 217–40, 227. c Eleonora Canepari, ‘Women on their way: Employment opportunities in cosmopolitan Rome’, in Deborah Simonton and Anne Montenach (eds.), Female Agency in the Urban Economy: Gender in European Towns 1640–1830 (London: Routledge, 2013), 206–23, 211. d M. Dorothy George, London Life in the XIIIth Century (London: Routledge, 1930), 111–12.

1700, and in London in the 1770s, three quarters of those applying for assistance at particular hospitals were immigrants.44 The prevalence of migrants among the poor is furthermore indicated by the introduction of the system of ‘acts of indemnity’ with which city authorities tried to prevent poor immigrants from burdening municipal poor relief.45 With economic decline at the end of the seventeenth century, various cities in Holland required newcomers to carry a so-called act of indemnity or letter of surety. In these letters an individual or organization of the home town promised to pay for the support of their out-migrant in case he or she would require assistance within a certain number of years. In this source over the period

44

45

Migrantenstad. Immigratie en sociale verhoudingen in 17e-eeuws Amsterdam (Hilversum: Verloren, 2005), 294–96. Eleonora Canepari, ‘Women on their way: Employment opportunities in cosmopolitan Rome’, in Deborah Simonton and Anne Montenach (eds.), Female Agency in the Urban Economy: Gender in European Towns 1640–1830 (London: Routledge, 2013), 206–23, 211; M. Dorothy George, London Life in the XIIIth Century (London: Routledge, 1930), 111–12. Marco H. D. van Leeuwen, ‘Overrun by hungry hordes? Migrants’ entitlements to poor relief in the Netherlands, 16th–20th centuries’, in Steven King and Anne Winter (eds.), Migration, Settlement and Belonging in Europe, 1500–2000: Comparative Perspective (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 173–203. On England, Naomi Tadmor, ‘The settlement of the poor and the rise of the form in England, c.1662–1780’, Past & Present 236 (2017), 43–97. On Venice, Teresa Bernardi, ‘Tracing migration within urban spaces: Women’s mobility and identification practices in Venice (sixteenth-eighteenth centuries)’ in Beatrice Zucca Micheletto (ed.), Gender and Migration in Historical Perspective. Institutions, Labour and Social Networks 16th to 20th Centuries (London: Palgrave, 2022), 39–81.

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1735–84, 18 per cent of the units immigrating and 29 per cent of the units emigrating consisted of women alone, compared to, respectively, 28 and 25 per cent consisting of men alone. The share of women migrating individually increased compared to the women migrating as part of families in the course of time.46 Migrants under suspicion or in the wrong place might be charged with ‘vagrancy’, a semantically vague charge, the prosecution of which varied by region and over time. In Brabant, vagrants found in court documents were arrested for travelling without documents and ‘begging’.47 In England it had connotations of being disorderly, but vagrancy registers were only irregularly kept. Table 6.2 shows the proportions of women among those charged with vagrancy in different places at different times, ranging from 20 to 30 per cent in Frankfurt am Main, Aix-en-Provence, Brabant and Sweden, to 35 per cent in non-metropolitan areas of England, to 55–70 per cent in London and the northern surrounding county of Middlesex. These figures should be regarded with caution, since they may reflect local ‘prosecution waves’ or equally a view that female vagrants were less of a threat to public order than their male counterparts, so more deserving of charity than prosecution, in some places, but apparently more of a threat to public order in the London metropolitan area.48 Judicial records are also available in some cities and towns to study migration. In Amsterdam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries more than 70 per cent of the women with a reported place of birth who appeared before the criminal courts were born outside the jurisdiction.49 Among prostitutes,

46

47 48

49

Based on the analysis of both arrivals and departures from eighteenth-century Leiden. The certificates do not mention the occupations of female immigrants. C. A. Davids, ‘De migratiebeweging in Leiden in de achttiende eeuw’, in H. A. Diederiks, D. J. Noordam and H. D. Tjalsma (eds.), Armoede en sociale spanning. Sociaal-historische studies over Leiden in de achttiende eeuw (Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren 1985), 137–56, 145, 152. Anne Winter, ‘“Vagrancy” as an adaptive strategy: The Duchy of Brabant, 1767–1776’, International Review of Social History 49:2 (2004), 249–77, 257. The proportion of women prosecuted for begging or vagrancy in Frankfurt am Main, for example, was significantly lower (24 per cent) than the estimates for early modern Germany more widely (35–40 per cent) based on the Gauner and Diebslisten, which included individuals identified as vagrants in the interrogation of others, but who were not formally prosecuted themselves. Jeannette Kamp, Crime, Gender and Social Control in Early Modern Frankfurt am Main (Brill: Leiden, 2019), 237, 239. Based on 20 sample years between 1620–1810, Ariadne Schmidt, Prosecuting Women. A Comparative Perspective on Crime and Gender before the Dutch Criminal Courts, c.1600–1810 (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 96. Police courts in eighteenth-century Antwerp are another possibility, but Gerrit Verhoeven, ‘How do these foreigners blend in? Migration and integration in late eighteenth-century Antwerp (1715–92)’, Cultural and Social History 13:2 (2016), 161–77, does not distinguish migrants by sex.

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Table 6.2. Proportion of women among those prosecuted for vagrancy in early modern Europe Place

Period

Number

% women

7 non-metropolitan English locations Frankfurt am Mainb Londonc Middlesex countyd

1598–1664 1600–1806 1747–1798 1777–1786

Aix-en-Provencee Duchy of Brabantf Swedeng

1725–1733 1767–1776 1829–1838

2,682 157 – 2,655 598 1,117 2,541 1,066

35 24 60 55 solo adults 70 adults with dependents 30 21 20

a

Sources: a Paul S. Slack, ‘Vagrants and vagrancy 1598–1664’, Economic History Review 27:3 (1974), 360–379, 366, table 2, with children omitted. b Jeannette Kamp, Crime, Gender and Social Control in Early Modern Frankfurt am Main (Brill: Leiden, 2019), 237, counting prosecuted beggars and vagrants. c Nicholas Rogers, ‘Policing the poor in eighteenth-century London. The vagrancy laws and their administration’, Histoire sociale/Social History 24:47 (1991), 127–47, 133. d Adam Crymble, Adam Dennett and Tim Hitchcock, ‘Modelling regional imbalances in English plebeian migration to late eighteenth-century London’, Economic History Review 71:3 (2018), 747–71, 752, counting the disorderly poor but not those who volunteered to leave, and percentages calculated not of the total (as in the source article) but of like migrant types (solo/with dependents). e Cissie C. Fairchilds, Poverty and Charity in Aix-en-Provence 1640–1789 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 104, 111–12. f Anne Winter, ‘“Vagrancy” as an adaptive strategy: The Duchy of Brabant, 1767–1776’, International Review of Social History 49:2 (2004), 249–77, 257. g Theresa Johnsson, Vårt fredliga samhälle: “Lösdriveri” och försvarslöshet i Sverige under 1830talet. Studia Historica Upsaliensia 254 (Uppsala, 2016), 510.

half of those registered in seventeenth-century Florence were immigrants to the city;50 of those interrogated in Amsterdam, nearly 80 per cent were immigrants in the later seventeenth century and over 70 per cent in the first half of the eighteenth century;51 and in a small sample of those arrested in early nineteenthcentury London, more than 60 per cent were immigrants to the city.52

50 51 52

John K. Brackett, ‘The Florentine Onestà and the control of prostitution, 1403–1680’, Sixteenth Century Journal 24:2 (1993), 273–300, 299, table 1, on a sample of 767 prostitutes. Lotte van de Pol, Het Amsterdams hoerdom. Prostitutie in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek, 1996), 103. Tony Henderson, Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London: Prostitution and Control in the Metropolis, 1730–1830 (London: Longman, 1999), 19–20.

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It might be thought that those in need of poor relief or prosecuted for crime were more likely to be migrants. Migrant status may have made individuals more vulnerable to prosecution by criminal courts.53 However, court depositions given by witnesses (not the accused) in England between 1565 and 1730 show between 56 and 78 per cent of all those testifying in court had moved from their parish of birth, and women were as likely to move as men.54 These studies covered more than 12,000 depositions, using courts which were likely to under-estimate rather than over-estimate poorer witnesses. So, it appears that it was not only the poorer sections of the urban population in which the majority of residents were immigrants. Where marriage registers recorded place of origin of the spouses, it is possible to establish proportions of immigrants in a population, although these will be minimum proportions since migrants may have been less likely to marry than the native born.55 Table 6.3 shows that in urban areas almost always one third or more and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries commonly more than half of both brides and grooms were immigrants to the city. Usually more grooms than brides were immigrant, although there is an exception in the city of Nördlingen in the Holy Roman Empire (population 8,500). However, the custom of marrying in the bride’s home parish will also have reduced the proportion of immigrant brides, particularly in smaller towns and cities; the couple did not necessarily remain in the place they married and may have returned to the groom’s home, making the bride the immigrant. Marriage registers of course did not capture those who had come to the city

53 54

55

Local-born were probably more likely to settle conflicts without interference of the full criminal court. Schmidt, Prosecuting Women, 254. Peter Clark, ‘Migration in England during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries’, Past & Present, 83 (1979), 57–90 [reprinted in Peter Clark and David Souden (eds.), Migration and Society in Early Modern England (London: Hutchinson, 1987), 213–52], for 7,000 rural and urban deponents 1660–1730 (64 per cent men, 69 per cent women); David Souden, ‘Migrants and the population structure of later seventeenth-century provincial cities and market towns’, in Peter Clark (ed.), The Transformation of English Provincial Towns 1600–1800 (London: Hutchinson, 1984), 133–68, 139, for 2,262 urban deponents 1661–1707 (56 per cent); Peter Earle, ‘The female labour market in London in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries’, Economic History Review 42:3 (1989), 328–53, 334, for 2,121 London women deponents 1665–1725 (69 per cent); Vivian Brodsky Elliott, ‘Mobility and marriage in pre-industrial England’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge (1978), 169 for 1,315 London deponents 1565–1644 (78 per cent). Katherine A. Lynch, ‘The European marriage pattern in the cities: Variations on a theme by Hajnal’, Journal of Family History 16:1 (1991), 79–96, 85; Lotte C. van de Pol, ‘The lure of the big city. Female migration to Amsterdam’, in Els Kloek, Nicole Teeuwen and Marijke Huisman (eds.), Women of the Golden Age. An International Debate on Women in Seventeenth-century Holland, England and Italy (Hilversum: Verloren, 1994), 73–82, 79.

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Table 6.3. Proportion of migrants in the marrying urban population in early modern Europe Place a

Nimes Dijonb (artisans) Nördlingenc Amsterdamd Leidene Leidene Genevaf Schwäbisch Hallg Igualada, Cataloniah Wϋrzburgi Lyonj Westminsterk Grenoblef Barmenf

Period

Number

% grooms immigrant

% brides immigrant

1550–1562 1551–1650 1581–1720 1601–1800 1586–1595 1641–1650 1625–1810 1650–1752 1680–1829 1701 1728–1788 1774–1781 1780 1815

1,040 618 8,229 650,000 1,949 2,475 – 774 5,250 – – 1,618 – –

33 38 13–14 60 78 68 40 38 43 74 31–37 80 63 64

18 34 20–22 44 76 56 36 30 33 57 31–43 69 54 54

Sources: a Allan A. Tulchin, ‘Low dowries, absent parents: Marrying for love in an early modern French town’, Sixteenth Century Journal 44:3 (2013), 713–38, calculated from figures on 717. b James R. Farr, Hands of Honor: Artisans and their World in Dijon, 1550–1650 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 140, table 3.6. c Christopher R. Friedrichs, Urban Society in an Age of War: Nördlingen 1580–1720 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 65, derived as median from table 2.1 presented by decade. d Lotte C. van de Pol, ‘The lure of the big city. Female migration to Amsterdam’, in Els Kloek, Nicole Teeuwen and Marijke Huisman (eds.), Women of the Golden Age. An International Debate on Women in Seventeenth-century Holland, England and Italy (Hilversum: Verloren, 1994), 73–82, 75. e Ellen Kruse, ‘Leidenaren en immigranten in de Gouden Eeuw: integratie of groepsvorming?’, Jaarboek der sociale en economische geschiedenis van Leiden en omstreken (1996), 35–49, 43, table 3. f Jan de Vries, European Urbanization 1500–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 185, 189–90. g Terence McIntosh, Urban Decline in Early Modern Germany: Schwäbisch Hall and its Region 1650–1750 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 141. h Julie Marfany, ‘Is it still helpful to talk about proto-industrialization? Some suggestions from a Catalan case study’, Economic History Review 63:4 (2010), 942–73, 967. i Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 49, from census. j Maurice Garden, Lyon et les Lyonnais aux XIIIe (Paris: Flammarion, 1970), tables 7, 8 and 9 for sample years 1728–30, 1749–51 and 1786–88, respectively. k M. Dorothy George, London Life in the XIIIth Century (London: Routledge, 1930), 111–12, where these were likely to be poorer people, listed in a hospital doctor’s case notes, rather than in a marriage register.

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already married, and also omitted those who never married.56 It can be shown in Amsterdam that female migrants in general, and foreign women in particular, were strongly under-represented in the marriage banns. Of course, those who moved once from the countryside to the city may have moved again and overseas migrants always left from urban ports. In the first half of the seventeenth century nearly 20 per cent of young Scottish men sought work abroad, most as mercenaries in Scandinavia.57 All ships carried more men than women to the new world but, in general, 10–40 per cent of trans-Atlantic emigrants were women.58 Of indentured servants shipping out of London to America in the seventeenth century, 62 per cent of men but only 33 per cent of women came from outside London.59 From the Netherlands, the ‘Indian leak’ or ‘maritime drain’ of young men to the East Indies probably skewed sex ratios in Dutch towns,60 although their number may have been over-estimated.61 Girls from the Amsterdam orphanage were sent to be wives

56

57

58

59 60 61

Kuijpers, Migrantenstad, 116; Lotte van de Pol and Erika Kuijpers, ‘Poor women’s migration to the city. The attraction of Amsterdam health care and social assistance in early modern times’, Journal of Urban History 32:1 (2005), 44–60, 46. Before 1675, the number of men marrying for the first time in Amsterdam was larger than the number of women. Van der Woude interpreted this as an indication of the shortage of marriageable women and a ‘heavy male surplus population caused by immigration’. A. M. van der Woude, ‘Sex ratios and female labour participation in the Dutch Republic’, in Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux and Sølvi Sogner (eds.), Socio-economic Consequences of Sex-Ratios in Historical Perspective, 1500–1900, Proceedings of the 11th International Economic History Congress (Milan: Universitá Bocconi, 1994), 65–79, 66–67; Van de Pol and Kuijpers critized this assumption by pointing out that marriage banns do not tell the whole story about immigration and argued that female immigration can be larger than the sex ratio among the people marrying for the first time would suggest. Van de Pol, ‘Lure of the big city’; Kuijpers, Migrantenstad, 101–4. T. C. Smout, N. C. Landsman and T. M. Devine, ‘Scottish emigration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, in Nicholas P. Canny (ed.), Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration 1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 76–95, 85. José C. Moya, ‘Canada and the Atlantic world: Migration from a hemispheric perspective, 1500–1800’, in Benjamin Bryce and Alexander Freund (eds.), Entangling Migration History: Borderlands and Transnationalism in the United States and Canada (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015), 14–46, 34–35. See also Ida Altman, Emigrants and Society: Extremadura and America in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), tables 8 and 9. For England, see David Souden, ‘“Rogues, whores and vagabonds”? Indentured servant emigration to North America and the case of mid-seventeenth-century Bristol’, Social History 3:1 (1978), 23–41, 26; and John Wareing, ‘Migration to London and transatlantic emigration of indentured servants, 1683–1775’, Journal of Historical Geography 7:4 (1981), 356–78, 372. John Wareing, Indentured Migration and the Servant Trade from London to America, 1618–1718 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 59. Van der Woude, ‘Sex ratios’, 72–73; Van de Pol and Kuijpers, ‘Poor women’s migration’, 46, 48. Sailors, mainly those from the towns in Holland, travelled more than once to the East, which implies that the total number of departing men was lower and, thus, the Indian leak smaller than has been assumed before. Available at: www.boomgeschiedenis.nl/documenten/de_wereld_en_ nederland/dossier_2.2.pdf (last accessed 12 June 2020).

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for male settlers, especially from the mid-seventeenth century.62 The same policy was applied in South Africa, although it was unsuccessful, so Dutch men there were allowed to marry local women.63 Most migration was of singles, but the proportion of women was highest among family migration from the Netherlands to the East Indies, from England to New England, from Germany and Switzerland to Nova Scotia and from Madeira and the Azores to Brazil.64 We can sum up the results of the sources that identify migrants in certain categories. Among the recipients of poor relief in four cities, who were predominantly female, 50–75 per cent were immigrants (Table 6.1). However, the proportion of immigrants among the poor may have been much lower in places where, or at times when, the urban population was stable or declining rather than growing. Among those prosecuted for vagrancy in seven different studies, in some places women were in the minority and in others they were in the majority (Table 6.2). Vagrancy might be thought of as ‘failed migration’, but the reasons for prosecution were so erratic that these figures must be treated cautiously. The proportion of migrants among those marrying in towns and cities is more secure, since most people married. In 11 urban locations, generally somewhat less than half of brides and somewhat more than half of grooms were immigrants (Table 6.3). Again, these proportions are likely to have been higher in growing towns and lower in stable towns, but they omit those who never married. In the least selective source, court witness depositions, women were as likely as men to have migrated, but this evidence is so far restricted to England. All of the sources for this information are geographically and chronologically patchy and their survival is serendipitous. A much more widely available source is burial registers. Sex ratios at burial have been used as ‘an inferential, “back door” method’ of approaching migration in the absence of more direct evidence.65 David Souden used southern English sex ratios at burial to infer the emigration or immigration of one sex or the other where sex ratios were skewed either towards men (>100) or towards women (