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WOMEN’S WORK
AND RIGHTS IN
EARLY MODERN
URBAN EUROPE
Anna Bellavitis
Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern
Urban Europe
Anna Bellavitis
Women’s Work and

Rights in Early
Modern Urban
Europe
Anna Bellavitis
University of Rouen
Rouen, France
Based on a translation from the Italian language edition:

Il lavoro delle donne nelle città dell’Europa moderna, by Anna Bellavitis
Copyright © Viella s.r.l. 2016
All Rights Reserved
Translated by Clelia Boscolo
ISBN 978-3-319-96540-6 ISBN 978-3-319-96541-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96541-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018954064
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Preface
Women Have Always Worked is the title of a book published in the United
States in 1981 and of another published in France in 2002, and perhaps
also of others of which I am not aware (Kesler Harris 1981; Schweitzer
2002). It seems strange to still have to remember this trivial truth, yet it
still happens to hear people say ‘Since women have worked…’, as if they
had never done it ‘before’. The real novelty of the last decades is that, in
very different quantities and in very different ways from one country to
another, women have had access, more than in the past, to roles of power
and responsibility: the so-called glass ceiling has been scaled up, although
not yet broken. However, competition between men and women in the
labour market, which may seem typical of the contemporary world and
perhaps a consequence of feminism, is in fact a constant element in the
history of work, as we shall see. Women work at home and outside the
home, and have always done so, even if, in recent years, due to the eco-
nomic crisis, but also in part as a result of new expectations and values of
life, many women in Western countries have ‘returned home’, abandon-
ing paid work outside, or doing it from home, thanks to the new
technologies.
We are talking about periods close to us, but the evolutions of technol-
ogy and economy, as well as the values and ideals of each society, have
always had a decisive influence on the possibilities that, throughout his-
tory, women have had to gain access to paid employment and, more
vii
viii Preface
g enerally, to play a significant role in the economy, not to mention biol-

ogy, that is the fact that for a part of their lives women can be pregnant,
give birth, breastfeed. At the time of the French Revolution, Condorcet
wrote that he could not understand why women’s transient illnesses—
menstruation, pregnancy and so on—should prevent them from enjoy-
ing citizenship rights, when no one would think of depriving them of the
male individuals who suffered periodically from gout or cold, but it is
clear that reproductive activities can prevent women from carrying out
certain work tasks or from leaving home. Production and reproduction
have always been a problem that women have to face and the solutions
can be various, today as in the past, even if we have to abandon the idea,
apparently taken for granted, that mothers of children worked less: on
the contrary, often their working rhythm increased as a consequence of
the increase of mouths to feed and the care of newborns was given to
other women of the family or to wet nurses.
The real and symbolic value of work changes from one society to
another and from one era to another, and women’s work has certainly not
always been valued, either in the past or in the present. For women, gen-
der identity prevails over work identity: rather than “female workers”, we
still speak of “working women” (Sullerot 1968; Simonton 2006). These
are phenomena of very long duration and structures from which we have
not yet come out. Women’s wages were most of the time lower than men’s
because, even when they were the only source of livelihood for a person
or an entire family, they were considered to be ‘complementary wages’
compared to the main wage of the husband and head of the family. In
order to construct this concept, a constant and pervasive work had to be
carried out to belittle women’s activities, to consider them as unskilled
even when they were skilled, to defend them or to prevent women from
accessing training, education and apprenticeship, to keep them in a state
of real and psychological minority and subordination and to persuade
them of their lesser value. And what can be said about the domestic work
and care of wives, mothers, sisters and minors, which is not recognised
and not remunerated because it is considered natural and which, even in
contemporary societies, is carried out more by women than by men?
Research into women’s work, gender relations and, more generally,
into the relationship between gender history and labour history in early
Preface ix
modern Europe is now extensive and it would be impossible to sum-

marise it in its entirety. The geographical coverage of the volume, Italy,
France, Germany, England, Spain, Netherlands, some forays into Poland,
Portugal, Scotland and Scandinavia, reflects the state of the art, my lim-
ited linguistic knowledge and my personal research interests, but it would
be absurd, on a subject of such vastness and on which the bibliography
continues to be enriched, to demand completeness. Moreover, in recent
years, new important research has enlarged our horizons to the history of
women in the Ottoman Empire showing also that in cities under Islamic
law, like Cairo or Istanbul, women had sometimes more important prop-
erty rights than in north-western Europe, regardless of their marital status
(Hunt 2009; Sperling and Wray 2010). The purpose of this book is not
and cannot be to offer a complete overview of decades of research, but
rather to question chronologies, evolutions and geographical polarisa-
tions that are too often considered obvious. The title of the book brings
together three terms: women, work and rights. It might seem more logi-
cal to associate these terms in the context of contemporary labour history
and trade-union claims over the last two centuries. However, as we shall
see in detail, the three terms must also be associated in the context of
early modern history, when we think about women’s rights to education,
to the management of their property, to accessing public space, all impor-
tant topics for a gendered history of work covering that period.
The book is organised in three parts. The first one presents a brief over-
view of the historiographical production on the topic and of the geogra-
phy of women’s rights to property and to education and will present some
examples of female careers in the arts and sciences. The second part pres-
ents a choice of occupations that are traditionally considered as typically
‘female’, including those activities that are linked to female bodies, as
breastfeeding, prostitution and midwifery, but also domestic service. The
third part focuses on women’s activities in urban crafts and trades.
The book is the revised and expanded version of the book Il lavoro delle
donne nelle città dell’Europa moderna (2016), published by Viella in the
series ‘Storia delle donne e di genere’ (History of Women and Gender) of
the Società Italiana delle Storiche (Italian Society of Women Historians).
I would like to thank Cecilia Palombelli and Vira Lanciotti for the
x Preface
e nthusiasm and professionalism with which they followed the Italian edi-
tion and the friends of the Società Italiana delle Storiche for the years
spent working and planning together. Angela Groppi has followed this
project from the beginning and without her support and advice the book
would never have been completed. In 2017, the book received the ‘Gisa
Giani’ prize, for which I warmly thank the jury and in particular its presi-
dent Angiolina Arru and the Istituto per la Storia dell’Umbria
Contemporanea (Institute for the History of Contemporary Umbria).
The book is the synthesis of the research of many historians, and with
some of them I have had the chance to work in the last years, in the con-
text of joint research programmes, such as the research project ‘Travail en
famille, travail non rémunéré en Europe (XVe–XXIe siècle)’ of the Ecole
Française de Rome and the research project ‘Producing Change. Gender
and Work in Early Modern Europe’, funded by the Leverhulme Trust,
and more generally in the occasion of international conferences and
workshops: in particular Maria Agren, Laura Casella, Amy L. Erickson,
Ida Fazio, Nadia Filippini, Margaret Hunt, Victoria Lopez Barahona,
Manuela Martini, Luca Molà, Anne Montenach, Monica Martinat,
Carmen Sarasua, Raffaella Sarti, Ariadne Schmidt, Alexandra Shepard,
Deborah Simonton, Angels Solà and Beatrice Zucca Micheletto. I would
like to thank Clelia Boscolo for the wise and patient translation, and the
Institut Universitaire de France that funded it, and Laura Pacey and Clara
Heathcock for accepting and following the English edition with patience
and professionalism.
Rouen, France Anna Bellavitis
References
Hunt, M. (2009). Women in Eighteenth-Century Europe. Abingdon/New York:
Routledge.
Kessler Harris, A. (1981). Women Have Always Worked. A Historical Overview.
New York: Feminist Press.
Schweitzer, S. (2002). Les femmes ont toujours travaillé. Une histoire du travail des
femmes aux XIXe et XXe siècles. Paris: Odile Jacob.
Preface xi
Simonton, D. (Ed.). (2006). The Routledge History of Women in Europe Since

1700. London/New York: Routledge.
Sperling, J. G., & Kelly Wray, S. (Eds.). (2010). Across the Religious Divide.
Women, Property, and Law in the Wider Mediterranean (ca. 1300–1800).
New York/London: Routledge.
Sullerot, E. (1968). Histoire et sociologie du travail feminine. Paris: Gonthier-Denoël.
Contents
Part I Women, Work, Rights and the City 1
1 Women Have Always Worked 3
2 The Gender of Work 19
3 Working Daughters, Wives, Mothers, Sisters, Widows 31
4 The ‘Decline Thesis’ and the Guilds: An ‘Accordion

Movement’? 43
5 From Globalisation to Industrialisation 57
6 Agency and Capabilities: North Versus South? 69
7 The Right to Learn, the Right to Teach: Intellectual and

Artistic Work as a Profession 87
xiii
xiv Contents
Part II Women’s Jobs 109
8 Servants and Slaves 111
9 Caring and Feeding 129
10 Midwives 145
11 Bodies as Resources 157
Part III Workshops and Markets 169
12 Learning at Home and on the Shop Floor 171
13 Women, Families, Guilds and the French Exception 183
14 Silk and Skill 197
15 Printed Tracks 209
16 In the Market Place 219
17 International Traders 235
Part IV Conclusions 251
18 Conclusion: Changes and Continuity 253
Index 263
Part I
Women, Work, Rights and the City
1
Women Have Always Worked
In the next chapters, we shall examine in detail the development of wom-

en’s work in relation to the great evolutions that characterised the early
modern age, but first it will be useful to propose a brief historiographical
overview.
Since the early decades of the twentieth century, some pioneering
research, to which we shall return, has been carried out, especially in
England and in particular at the London School of Economics. In an
article from 1992, Maxine Berg drew attention to the important contri-
bution made by some women historians to economic history, from the
Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution, including Eileen Power, Alice
Clark and Ivy Pinchbeck, concluding that: “the decline of women in the
economic history profession has, it seems, coincided with their exclusion
from our historical memory” (Berg 1992). These three historians carried
out fundamental research on women’s work, Eileen Power in relation to
the middle ages, Alice Clark for the early modern age and Ivy Pinchbeck
for the industrialisation era, suggesting readings and interpretations that
have influenced historiography to this day. The tradition of research on
these issues has remained alive and, in Britain, the historiographical pro-
duction on women’s work in early modern times is vast and constantly
© The Author(s) 2018 3

A. Bellavitis, Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96541-3_1
4 A. Bellavitis
evolving. During the course of the book, reference will often be made to
this abundant bibliography, but the English case is not the main focus of
the book, one of the aims of which is precisely to broaden the framework
and adopt as European a perspective as possible.
Louise Tilly’s and Joan Scott’s book: Women, Work and Family, pub-
lished in 1978, which focuses on the evolution of women’s work in
England and France from 1700 to 1950 (Tilly and Scott 1978) represents
an important milestone in the debate on the role of women’s work in his-
tory and has become a model for other historical periods as well. Tilly
and Scott showed the continuity between the types of work that women
did before, during and after the development of industrial capitalism.
Later research confirmed that, for much of the nineteenth century, both
men and women were employed mainly in the traditional sectors of the
urban economy and that, even in England, it was in those sectors (crafts,
commerce, services), and not in manufacturing, that the greatest increase
in female employment was recorded (Hill 1989). Above all, Tilly and
Scott analysed women’s work in relation to family roles and family mod-
els, drawing attention to the market work activities carried out by women
in their homes. In their introduction to the new 1987 edition, they
insisted that productive and reproductive roles within the family should
not be seen as “natural”, but as political and ideological constructs:
“reproduction is a culturally defined, socially organized activity; it has no
inherent or inevitable social consequence for women” (Tilly and Scott
1987: 8).
Any history of women’s work must therefore consider the pivotal role
attributed by Tilly and Scott to the family and in particular assess any:
bargaining, negotiation and domination as well as consensus about what

family interest was. Conflict erupted because of unequal power relation-
ships […] family members invoked competing ideologies to justify their
actions […]. These negotiations at once accepted and questioned existing
concepts of households and family roles. Future research needs to focus
on such family bargaining and decision making as a way of understand-
ing behavior for this will shed new light on the ways in which existing
division of labor by age and sex were transformed or reproduced. (Tilly
Scott 1987: 9)
Women Have Always Worked 5
The authors used the words “negotiation”, “bargaining” and “conflict”,

but not the concept of “agency”, which was brought to gender history by
Edward P. Thompson’s “history from below”, as well as by the rethinking
of Foucault and Derrida, through Judith Butler’s feminist criticism and
has become central to women’s economic history in more recent years
(Montenach 2012; Fazio 2013). In 2013, in their introduction to the
volume Female Agency in the Urban Economy, Anne Montenach and
Deborah Simonton pointed out that “the concept of agency seldom has
been explicitly used and discussed by early modern historians” and
declared the need to:
illustrate the circumstances under which women could rise above their
restrictive situations, and illuminate the factors – age, marital and social
status, political or economic climate – that determined their ability to
manage their own lives […] Agency here is not conceptualized strictly in
terms of resistance to male authority or patriarchal patterns, but arose from
the variety of everyday interactions in which women accommodated, nego-
tiated or manipulated social rules and gender roles. (Montenach and
Simonton 2013: 4–5)
In addition to the concept of ‘agency’, recent research developments in

women’s history deal with the concept of ‘capabilities’, that is, according
to Amartya Sen, “what a person can do and can be”. “Capability involves
an understanding of the individual’s freedom to operate and an ability to
participate in economic, social and political actions” (Fontaine 2013:
56). Agency and capabilities must be related to the ‘resources’ to which
women, or men, can have access, as well as to the ability to search for, and
create such resources.
In their introduction to the 1987 edition, Tilly and Scott also specified
that their analysis included the work for the market carried out by women
at home, but not unpaid ‘reproductive’ work and ‘care’ work, performed
by wives and mothers primarily, but also daughters, unmarried aunts and
other family members. This is a very long-standing issue, but its charac-
teristics change throughout history (Davidson 1982; Hill 1989). The dis-
tinction between “productive” and “reproductive” work is rejected by
feminist economy research (Duffy 2011) even if it is almost impossible to
6 A. Bellavitis
assess this work economically, unless we can establish an equivalence with

the wages of people who carried out the same type of activity as paid
work, namely servants, nurses, cooks and so on (Folbre and Wagman
1993).
Research on women’s work contributes then to the redefinition of the
concept of work that, in the Swedish research project Gender & Work
directed by Maria Ågren, is defined as any activity that allowed people to
“make a living” (Ågren 2017). Nevertheless, family members have always
performed “productive” unpaid work in their family shops: the sale,
accounting, organisation work carried out by the wives of the craftsmen
or shopkeepers, as well as the craft work that the wives and children of
masters carried out in workshops, were not assessed in terms of wages
(Martini and Bellavitis 2014; Bellavitis et al. 2016; Bellavitis 2018). In
actual fact, the work of master craftsmen, traders or shopkeepers was
never assessed in terms of wages either, but the difference lies in their
social status and also, as we shall see in more detail below, in the assess-
ment of these roles made by quantitative sources. Master craftsmen and
shopkeepers appeared in censuses and tax roles as ‘active’, whereas their
wives, who also worked, were rarely considered as such. The question of
sources is one of the central problems in women’s history, and we shall
look into it in more detail in the following pages.
In 1990, the History of Women in the West, edited by Georges Duby and
Michelle Perrot, was published in Italy and the French edition came out
in 1991. Immediately translated into many other languages, the series
represented an important international and collective attempt to provide
a summary of women’s history in Western Europe and America. It was
followed by many others, and replaced more recently by “global” assess-
ments (Meade and Weisner-Hanks 2004). The third volume, Renaissance
and Enlightenment Paradoxes, opened with the essay “Women, work and
family” by Olwen Hufton (Hufton 1990 and 1993 for the English edi-
tion), who highlighted how the work of women in early modern times
was part of a “makeshift economy”, characterised by precarious work and
the need to find solutions to poverty on a daily basis. In the wake of these
studies, an important line of research has developed on the role of women
in illegal activities such as theft or smuggling (Rublack 1999; Montenach
2013, 2015), which has also highlighted, as we shall see, cases of leniency
by the authorities, within a moral economy aimed at protecting the weak-

est members of society.
In 1990, the Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Institute of
Economic History Francesco Datini of Prato, La donna nell’economia,
secc. XIII–XVIII (Woman in economy, thirteenth–eighteenth centuries),
held in 1989, were also published. The conference helped to recognise the
topic of women’s work as a central one for economic history, but the most
interesting methodological proposals came from the debate and round
tables that, as was the tradition of the conferences of the Istituto Datini,
were included in the volume of the proceedings. During the round table
on urban work, Angela Groppi called for avoiding a too rigid distinction
between male and female work, not to remain bogged down in the model
of the family economy, which ignores economically active women alone,
and introduced the concept of the economic “value” of women (Groppi
1990), that she developed in the volume The Work of Women, the third of
a series on the history of women in Italy, which is considered as the
“Italian response” to the History of Women in the West, and was published
in 1996. This book is still a fundamental point of reference, but unfortu-
nately it was never translated into English and therefore is little known
outside Italy (Groppi 1996a). A very important aspect of the interpreta-
tive approach proposed by Angela Groppi, and developed in particular
with regard to the early modern age, is precisely the interweaving of work
and rights: in particular, the distinction between women’s work and
women’s value, or rather between women’s ability to produce wealth
through their work and their characteristic of “being” wealth, as bearers
of dowries, in the specific context of the Roman legal tradition:
The fact that laws and statutes provided specific mechanisms for the pro-
tection of dowries, to protect them from being squandered or badly admin-
istered by husbands, made them a particularly valuable asset, which could
be saved from the onslaught of creditors, thus not only protecting women
but their entire families from unfortunate investments or bankruptcies.
(Groppi 1996b: 148)
More recently, the role of the dowry in the history of the Italian family
was called into question by Tine De Moor and Ian Luiten Van Zanden,
8 A. Bellavitis
who proposed the existence of a link between the so-called European

marriage pattern (EMP), in its North-Western version, the possibilities of
young women’s agency and economic independence and the more gen-
eral economic development of the societies that practised it. It is a very
interesting attempt to include the history of women and gender in the
‘great narrative’ of European economic development, which however is
questionable, as it does not take enough into consideration the role of
women’s work in European regions where the dowry system existed.
According to this model, Southern Europe, characterised by the Roman
legal tradition and the separation of property between spouses, did not
offer young women any incentive to become economically independent
or wives to invest in family businesses, whereas the customary systems of
Northern Europe, based on the pooling of the wealth accumulated by
betrothed couples before marriage, were an incentive to independence
and women’s agency (De Moor and van Zanden 2010). We shall return
later to some of the legal differences between European regions and their
consequences on the economic activities of men and women, but it must
be stressed that a dowry could be both the part of family inheritance
destined to daughters and the fruit of their work. Despite being managed
by husbands during marriage, it was recovered by women who were wid-
owed. In fact, the geography of the laws on women’s economic rights was
much more articulated than the simple polarisation between Southern
Roman tradition and Northern customary laws: some regions of Northern
Europe were influenced by Roman legal tradition, and customary laws
were important in some regions of Southern Europe too (Fontaine 2013;
Bellavitis and Zucca Micheletto 2018).
The link between economic development, EMP and women’s agency
has been criticised by Tracy Dennison and Sheilagh Ogilvie who, on the
basis of the analysis of 4705 demographic observations, covering wom-
en’s marriage age, female lifetime celibacy and household complexity in
39 European countries, concluded that “there is no evidence that the
EMP improved economic performance by empowering women, increas-
ing human capital investment, adjusting population to economic trends,
or sustaining beneficial cultural norms. European economic success was
not caused by the EMP and its sources must therefore be sought in other
factors” (Dennison and Ogilvie 2014: 651). Such a debate is part of a
more general discussion on the respective advantages to economic devel-

opment of European family models (Carmichael et al. 2016). This dis-
cussion is often based on a stereotyped view of the Mediterranean family,
which historical and anthropological research has deeply criticised, show-
ing that it is not true that the nuclear family spread earlier in Northern
Europe and that Mediterranean family models have long been character-
ised by low age at marriage and extended families (Barbagli 1984; Viazzo
2003; Fazio 2004, 2005; Alessi 2013). As Raffaella Sarti has written, Italy
has been ‘a test’ of big generalisations and of models proposed by family
historians and demographers:
The great variety of situations in Italy has proved irreducible to any effort
to bring the country back to a unique model of family formation and fam-
ily structure. Not only that. Together with the data from the research on
the Iberian Peninsula, it also made it possible to prove that, at least since
the sixteenth-seventeenth century, the “Mediterranean” model suggested
by Laslett has never existed: the characteristics that should have character-
ised it (high nuptiality rate and a high number of complex families) have
rarely been seen together in Italy and in Spain. (Sarti 2006: 159)
In the last decades, in the field of economic history, and in particular

work history, new themes and new spaces have come to make the histo-
riographical landscape richer and more complex. The study of European
history cannot be carried out without also taking a ‘global history’
approach and, as we shall see, the development of trade relations with the
new world and the colonies had a direct influence on the job opportuni-
ties offered to women and more generally on the opportunities to become
‘agents’ in their lives. The role of women in the credit market, and more
generally the opportunities they had to invest and make a profit on their
capital, is another issue that has been at the core of recent research (Froide
2017). Finally, refined quantitative research has made it possible to high-
light the characteristics of the female labour market and its effects on
wage discrimination, which has always characterised women’s work (van
Nederveen Meerkerk 2010; Humphries and Weisdorf 2015).
Writing a history of women, after decades of research on gender his-
tory, may seem out of fashion. But, besides the fact that the international
10 A. Bellavitis
production of monographs, collections of essays and articles on women’s

history has never stopped, the history of women’s work and women’s
rights sheds light on the gender identities of work and therefore, more
generally, also on men’s work. The research that has focused on women’s
work has, for example, highlighted how the figure of the male ‘breadwin-
ner’ was an ideological and political construct, especially developed in the
context of the fights for the recognition of rights of the last two centuries.
Joan Scott’s essay in the volume on the nineteenth century of the History
of Women in the West made it very clear what the combined effects of the
industrialisation processes and of the philosophical debates on the ‘uni-
versal’ rights of ‘citizens’ in the context of the French Revolution had
been. The so-called Industrial Revolution (a controversial term that we
will discuss later) created many paradoxes: on the one hand, faced with
the tragic consequences of the indiscriminate exploitation of women and
children, a social critique developed, as well as the need for laws to pro-
tect children and motherhood; on the other hand, it was theorised that
women’s wages must only complement men’s, and that women should
therefore work outside the home only when strictly necessary. The politi-
cal, social and economic debate on the Industrial Revolution led to the
identification of the husbands and fathers as ‘breadwinners’ for the whole
family, while the women’s wages had to be lower and, as such, ‘comple-
mentary’. At the same time, women, identified as “nature”, were excluded
from the “public” space of politics, reserved for men (Scott 1990 and
1993 for the English edition). As we shall see in detail in the course of the
book, in the early modern period the family model was not so different,
except that the problem of ‘universal rights’ did not arise. The so-called
universal suffrage, in fact limited by wealth, that was achieved in the
nineteenth century excluded women while affirming the domestic ideal
of the ‘housewife’.
According to a strong historiographical tradition, particularly on the
English case, between the end of the eighteenth century and the first half
of the nineteenth century, this “domestic ideal” had important conse-
quences on work opportunities offered to women from the “bourgeoisie”
who were excluded both from the public and productive spheres at the
same time (Davidoff and Hall 1987). The issue of the separation of a
“male” public sphere from a “female” domestic sphere within the bour-
geois society of nineteenth-century England has given rise to important

studies and is still the subject of debates (Barker 2006; Phillips 2006;
Davidoff and Hall 2014). However, research on women’s work has shown
not only that women have always worked, but that censuses and popula-
tion statistics tended to underestimate their work. In the early modern
and modern periods, the classifications used by censuses and tax lists,
based almost always on the family nucleus, did not allow, except in very
rare cases, female work to appear. The origins of the “male breadwinner
ideology” go back a long way (Horrell and Humphries 1997; Gray 2000;
Humphries 2010), but it has been suggested that, in the early modern
period, the fact that wives were in charge of managing, saving and increas-
ing household assets “lent an occupational dimension to the term ‘wife’”
(Shepard 2015a: 257). The so-called U curve of statistics on female
labour, according to which, in the nineteenth century, the rate of female
activity fell as compared to the early modern age, and then went up again
during the twentieth century, could then be a statistical bias, due to the
different identifications of women and their activities (Folbre 1991;
Humphries and Sarasúa 2012).
The three terms in the title: women, work and rights are situated in a
defined space, the city, understood as a space that, during the early mod-
ern age, was shaped by the experience of men and women: a space that
was at the same time very rigid and structured by economic and political
institutions but also very open to any possibility (Simonton and
Montenach 2013; Simonton et al. 2015; Simonton 2017). To belong to
a city meant also to become part of the citizen’s body, to gain social ben-
efits and economic privileges, but also to be subject to its rules. Women
could obtain a status of citizens, even if often with some restrictions and,
especially in northern Europe, this status was closely linked to appren-
ticeship and guilds. The size of the city, its location and productive organ-
isation and the role it occupied in the state structure to which it belonged
determined not only its economic activities, but also the role and power
of the guilds that structured urban crafts. In the early modern age,
European cities underwent profound changes: in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries, epidemics still claimed many victims from urban
societies, leaving gaps that had to be filled by immigrants, but, at the end
of the period, in some European regions, it was the transformation of
12 A. Bellavitis
agriculture and the industrial development that led to increasingly impor-

tant population movements from the countryside to the cities. Working
in a city meant tackling the possibilities and risks offered by dynamic and
expanding economic situations, and operating in a context that, for bet-
ter or for worse, attracted young people of both sexes looking for oppor-
tunities or simply for the means of survival, but it also meant having to
deal with established trade organisations to which women generally had
limited access.
Doing historical research on women’s work does not only mean look-
ing for female activities in sources that are not very explicit, it also means
questioning the gender identity of specific occupations: as we shall see,
certain activities that today seem strongly characterised from the point of
view of the gender of those who carry them out were much less so in the
past. On the other hand, the separation between a male public space and
a female private space was much less clear-cut than one might think
today. Living and working in the streets, or on the doorsteps of houses
that were very often too small, was normal for urban dwellers. Women
cooked, and master craftsmen’s wives prepared lunch for workers and
apprentices, but many people hardly ever ate at home and bought ready-
made meals from women who sold them in the streets, as is still the case
today in many parts of the world.
The fact that many women worked at home and were rarely admitted
to the guilds has been an obstacle to historical research which, as we shall
see, had to look at sources which apparently have nothing to do with the
world of work, such as the archives of the courts, notarial deeds or even
the so-called private sources, diaries and correspondence. It would have
been difficult to find information on the organisation of the work of the
washerwomen of eighteenth-century Rome without legal sources, but the
study of civil trials has highlighted the conflicts over the occupation of
public space and the use of water among women who earned their living
washing other people’s clothes (Lilli 2008). A merchant’s letters to his
wife tell us that, when he was travelling, she was in charge of the business,
even though she had not been formally invested with this role by a notar-
ial deed giving her power of attorney (Maitte 2016). A craftsman’s will
tells us that his wife and daughters had contributed to the weaving busi-
ness, and that they would continue with it, after the master weaver’s
death, on the looms that he had left them as a legacy (Bellavitis 2008).
The statement of a witness in a trial explains much about a woman’s life,
lived between precarious—today we would say “flexible”—jobs and
illegal activities (Shepard 2015b), and the account books of a bourgeois
mansion can reveal the unexpected managerial skills of a quiet lady
from the countryside (Casella 2015). As we shall see, even more classic
and institutional sources, such as guilds statutes and the payrolls of hos-
pitals and monasteries, sometimes speak of female work: of crafts-
women struggling to assert their rights, of nurses or teachers who
received regular wages, even if lower than their male colleagues’, or even
of servants and laundresses employed by religious or secular communi-
ties. Even more surprising is the fact that prostitution also had its pay-
roll and that in the archives of the Département des femmes galantes of
the Paris Police the contracts of eighteenth-century escort-girls are
preserved (Kushner 2015).
Historical research has shown the importance of women’s work in
urban economies in the early modern age, but also the spread of activities
on the verge of legality or beyond it. We are not only talking about pros-
titution, which was not always illegal, but also about spinners who
rounded up their wages by selling the silk thread they stole from the
merchants they worked for, about itinerant saleswomen who were not
registered in the guilds or even about smuggling and marketing wines
and other products whose trade was regulated by municipal or state
authorities. As we shall see, it was not always a matter of acting totally
illegally, but of inserting oneself in the gaps between rules that were often
ambiguous or not very explicit. The answers given by women in courts or
the petitions presented to municipal authorities have in many cases high-
lighted their ability to manipulate rules and interpret traditions, proving
their “agency” (Groppi 2002). It was an underground economy that,
however, allowed part of the urban population to survive, earning some-
thing and buying goods at lower prices than those charged on the official
market (Montenach 2013).
Paraphrasing the title of an essay by Gianna Pomata (Pomata 1983),
we could say that the history of women’s work is a “borders’ issue”:
borders between internal and external spaces, between legality and illegal-
ity, between job identities.
14 A. Bellavitis
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2
The Gender of Work
Archives and libraries have been scoured for evidence, documents and
data on the work of women in the past, on the assumption that economic
independence was the primary condition, necessary though not suffi-
cient, to have control over one’s own existence. At the same time, histori-
cal research has focused on activities carried out in the family, where the
vital contribution of women and children is more difficult to document,
even in professions that today we perceive as typically feminine. We can,
for example, mention the families of launderers (lavandari), documented
in Bologna in the eighteenth century, in which the head of the family was
a male master launderer, who organised the work of his wife, children
and possibly even other relatives or servants (Palazzi 1990). But to what
extent was work a source of identity, independence and pride for women
in the past? This question has been central to a great deal of recent
research, which has endeavoured and often, as we shall see, managed to
overcome the image of women in the workplace exclusively as resources
to be exploited (Hafter and Kushner 2015).
Working was rarely a choice, an opportunity for emancipation or a
career; more often than not, it was effort, suffering and obligation in a
world where, for much of the early modern age, the social ideal was that
of the rentier: the head of his family and servants, who lived on income

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96541-3_2
20 A. Bellavitis
and did not engage in any “mechanical arts” (Hofmeester and Moll-
Murata 2011; Arnoux 2012; Lis and Soly 2012). And yet, almost every-
body worked, men and women, and for their entire lives, starting out as
children, since very few went to school, and stopping only when they
died, as there was no pension system as such. In eighteenth-century
Madrid, María de Oñoro, aged 71, worked as laundress to pay the rent of
the room where she lived and Rosa Parra, aged 89, worked as a fruit
seller: “for poor workers, life and activity are practically the same” (López
Barahona 2016: 42). Charity systems, after all, did not allow those who
were taken in by hospices and orphanages to remain idle, but expected
them to contribute to their living costs by working. The most widespread
female occupations, such as spinning, did not require much physical
strength and could therefore be carried out up to a very old age. They
could also be carried out by men, and, in hospices, men often engaged in
these kinds of occupations to support themselves. However, the decline
in eyesight as a consequence of old age made the abandonment of such
activities inevitable at some point (Groppi 2010, 2011). Beyond mere
subsistence, what independence and what bargaining power with fathers,
husbands or masters could the jobs that women could and had to do in
the past provide?
Some occupations were considered more suitable for women, and
there are some tasks that can only be performed by females. Nevertheless,
even breastfeeding other women’s children, an intrinsically feminine
occupation, was sometimes managed by men and with men. In
Renaissance Florence, the balii, or husbands of the wet nurses, would
negotiate with the newborns’ fathers the price of their wives’ services
(Klapisch-Zuber 1980). However, the very notion of ‘women’s’ and
‘men’s’ jobs was neither obvious nor fixed, in much the same way as it
happens nowadays.
For example, the spread of rural ‘proto-industry’ in the early modern
age involved both men and women and, at the beginning of the sixteenth
century, the German humanist Sebastian Franck observed, with a mix of
surprise and disappointment, in the countryside around Ulm and
Augsburg, some men and boys, “vigorous, active and strong”, busy spin-
ning wool and chatting, “as if they were women”. A wonderful example
of a reversal of gender roles and proof that, whenever there was need or
The Gender of Work 21
opportunity, almost no job had a fixed and permanent gender identity

(Wiesner 1996). In eighteenth-century England, the making of clothes
was no longer a monopoly of men and with the emergence of mantua-
making part of the trade passed into the hands of women (Hill 2001).
Similarly, as we shall see, silk weaving, an activity mainly performed by
men in the Middle Ages and at the beginning of the early modern period,
became a female activity in eighteenth-century Italy, during a contraction
of the market which made it necessary to save on production costs
(Groppi 1996).
Technological advances have always had consequences for gender roles
in the workplace and, in the industrial age, the mechanisation of some
production processes prompted the entry of poorly skilled and, therefore,
lower-paid women into the factories. On the contrary, at the beginning
of the early modern period, in some European regions, the use of mechan-
ical looms in the manufacture of wool stockings pushed women out of an
occupation that, until then, had been carried out exclusively by women.
The paradox is that, at the end of the sixteenth century, in some cities of
the German Empire, having succeeded in excluding women from the
mechanised production of stockings, master knitters asked the city
authorities to exclude women from the production of hand-knitted
stockings, alleging that even that kind of production was too skilled. Yet,
in the past, it had always been carried out by women (Wiesner 1996).
Occupations with a strong public role were hardly ever accessible to
women. It is certainly no coincidence that a ‘public man’ was, and still is,
a famous and socially recognisable male individual, whereas ‘public
woman’ was used in the past, but fortunately no longer, to indicate a
prostitute. In the religious processions that marked the urban rituals in
Sicilian cities, in the early modern age, the men would parade according
to ordered hierarchies that reflected their belonging to the various social
bodies, whereas the women were a random, disorganised and sometimes
even irreverent presence, according to a kind of ritual reversal of tradi-
tional behavioural norms (Laudani 1996). In German cities, men had a
public role in guilds’ processions, whereas women remained on the side-
lines. However, the ceremonies organised by the associations of typically
female occupations, such as midwives, were experienced by members as
important opportunities to create group cohesion and a professional
22 A. Bellavitis
identity, according to what the Strasbourg midwives declared in 1584

(Wiesner 1996).
Women were present in many sectors which today, in Europe at least,
may seem strictly male. In Besançon, in 1601, a number of women
worked alongside men to rebuild the square and they were “charged with
digging up all the soil in the cemetery”, extracting from the ground “the
bones, and carrying them to the area of the cemetery behind the afore-
mentioned church”. Other women were employed in the construction of
fortifications for which “they carried the soil to build the necessary foot-
ings” and in 1615 a number of girls were paid for the “transportation of
stones in front of the sluices in order to raise them”. Outside the urban
environment, we find women in mines or saltworks doing manual labour,
but also performing roles requiring the organisation of the work of oth-
ers. These roles, called “offices”, could be passed on to other women in
the family (Delsalle 2008). Finally, the women that accompanied the
armies in military campaigns were not just prostitutes or romantic adven-
turers dressed as men, but food or wine purveyors and laundresses
employed by military commands for day-to-day services, and also sol-
diers’ wives. With their children, they followed their husbands because, if
they stayed at home, they would not have been able to support them-
selves. In the eighteenth century, the Prussian army allowed five women,
along with their children, for every hundred soldiers. If a soldier died, his
widow was allowed to marry another, to ensure protection and support
for herself and her children (Potter 2006).
The only activities ascribed to women in Tommaso Garzoni’s ambi-
tious book, The Universal Assembly of All the Professions in the World
(1585), are (according to the book’s classifications): “soothsayers, witches,
court ladies, agents for maids, prostitutes, panders, wool spinners, spin-
ners, laundresses, midwives, dry- or wet-nurses”. In some instances,
women reappear in chapters devoted to individual jobs, so, about embroi-
derers, for example, Garzoni writes: “this job has more to do with decora-
tion than comfort, and it is more for women than for men” (Cerchi and
Collina 1996: 790–791). The observation is interesting also because,
until the beginning of the sixteenth century, the work of embroidery was
in the hands of men, and working with the needle did not endanger their
social reputation. On the contrary, embroiderers were a highly appreciated
category of workers who enjoyed a status not unlike painters, with whom
they often divided shops and orders (Plebani 2016). In his chapter on
actors, Garzoni lavished praise on the great Italian actresses of his time,
such as the ‘pretty Isabella’, the ‘erudite Vicenza’ or the ‘divine Vittoria’.
When discussing female activities, Garzoni had no qualms only for laun-
dresses and spinners, both noble and necessary crafts, whereas he described
all others in very unflattering terms. Beyond the misogyny and obvious
snobbery of such criticism, articulated by a cleric, the activities carried by
women in early modern European cities were far more numerous, even
though, perhaps, there were never any female “teachers of hieroglyphs”,
or “street thugs” (Cerchi and Collina 1996: 1182).
Crafts, domestic service and retail trade were the most frequent female
occupations in urban contexts. The products that some cities specialised
in determined what opportunities for work existed for women. That is
why in Geneva, for example, between the sixteenth and the seventeenth
centuries, a third of people employed in the manufacture of watches were
women (Mottu-Weber 1990). In Florence, where textile production was
one of the main activities, in 1604 women represented 62 per cent of
weavers and around 40 per cent of all wool workers and, in 1662–1663,
38 per cent of workers in the wool sector and 84 per cent of silk workers
(Brown and Goodman 1980).
Many women worked as employees of municipal and religious institu-
tions. For example, in Nuremberg, women could be granted a municipal
licence allowing them to practise as estimators for post-mortem invento-
ries; a very important activity, since every death required an inventory,
regardless of the social or marital status of the deceased, and multiple
skills were needed to estimate the value of objects, clothes, luxury goods
and work tools (Wiesner 1981). To deal with immovable goods, however,
the services of male experts were called upon, adhering to a significant
division of roles, which is sometimes also found in succession laws,
according to which women inherited the movable assets and men the
immovable (Bellavitis 2008).
In Rotterdam, in 1680, about 16 per cent of the lower level offices
were held by women and, in 1727, their share had increased to a third.
They worked in almost all sectors of government activity: general admin-
istration, public order and safety, public works, trade and transport,
24 A. Bellavitis
health and social care, education and the church. They were also involved
in tax or toll collection: it is, for example, the case of Maria Jacobs Koele
in Gouda, who inherited the toll collection lease from her late husband
in 1713 and passed it on to her daughter. Aeltgen Hendricx from Leiden
took over the office of postman from her late husband and made a living
as a messenger to Antwerp and travelled there with colleagues from other
towns. The employment opportunities of women in local public offices
expanded in Dutch cities, during the early modern period (van der
Heijden and Schmidt 2010). In some cases, the process of “professional-
ization” that characterised the eighteenth century led to the exclusion of
women from labour markets, but this was not the case in those sectors
in which qualities that were considered as typically “female”, like caregiv-
ing and nurturing, were important, as it was the case in orphanages
(Schmidt 2008).
In the city of A Coruña in Galicia, in 1753, the Real Audiencia paid
a female road sweeper an annual salary of 365 reales and two female
water suppliers, who supplied the army, a salary of 500 reales; in Santiago
de Compostela, the prison service would occasionally recruit a pedidera
de limonsas, that is a woman asking for alms for prisoners (Rey Castelao
2010). In Seville, in 1587, the San Ermenegildo Hospital paid a salary
to three women working as cooks and laundresses, assisted by six girls,
who received 9000 maravedis as salaries and 20,000 as dowries (Perry
1990). In some public or institutional occupations, in the early modern
period, there were restrictions linked to age and marital status: in
England, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, court ladies-
in-waiting had to be unmarried and were dismissed if they became preg-
nant; head nurses in charity hospitals, on the other hand, had to be
either married or widows (Mendelson and Crawford 1998). In the
Venetian Casa delle Zitelle, a charitable institution for young women at
risk of falling into prostitution, a candidate for the position of governess,
called Madre, had to be at least 40 years old and would ideally have
already spent at least 12 years working for the house. “Thus it appears
that working for the Casa delle Zitelle could be something of a career for
a woman” (Chojnacka 1998: 75).
In female monasteries, too, working and producing goods for sale
could be indispensable, given the chronic liquidity crisis that characterised
these institutions in the early modern age. Such “secular” activities were
subject to strict controls, at least in theory, as shown in the records of a
bishop’s visit to a Venetian monastery in 1521:
Great upheaval, and the origin of many evils, arises because many nuns
would not submit to working in the communal workshop; therefore we
order that all nuns submit to working in the communal workshop, and
never in their own cells. […] The Mother Abbess is to nominate some nuns
to read in turn from some spiritual book in the workshop, and nuns must
sing psalms together as they do in well-ruled monasteries. […] They must
produce only things approved by their Mother Superiors, useful to the
monastery and for honest and respectable people who do not cause scandal.
(Campagnol 2012: 121–122)
The problem was that the nuns engaged in sewing items that were too
precious and refined, producing lace and embroidery that, in actual fact,
they used for themselves, in clear violation of the rules on the poverty of
their garments, or donated to their numerous visitors rather than to the
religious or civil authorities which supported the monastery, or even sold
for personal profit and not to supplement the resources of their commu-
nity. Thus, for example, in 1571, the prioress of the convent of San
Giuseppe in Castello denounced one of her sisters, Deodata, to the
Provveditori sopra Monasteri (Superintendents of Monasteries). Sister
Deodata was able to work “miraculously with pearls and jewels”, but also
had the terrible habit of giving away handkerchiefs, shirts and hats
“resplendent with gold and silver lace” to some friars from the Augustinian
convent of Sant’Antonio and San Salvador. For this reason, in the 13 years
spent at the convent, “she never worked for the monastery, and every-
thing that she earned she used for herself, and spent everything”
(Campagnol 2012: 118, 124–125). Such activities with the outside world
were far from encouraged by the religious authorities, who rather deplored
the fact that nuns devoted themselves too much to occupations that had
nothing to do with prayer. At times, they even came into conflict with
the guilds, as can be gleaned from a declaration submitted in 1529 to the
Venetian Senate by some silk weavers, who complained about the
competition from the city’s monasteries in the preparation of warps
(Molà 2000: 424).
26 A. Bellavitis
In the wage books of the Arsenal, one of the main Venetian industries,
there were, in the mid-seventeenth century, between 25 and 40 velere
(female sailmakers). For a daily wage between 14 and 16 soldi, they
stitched sails under the guidance of a mistress who was paid two soldi
more. Contemporary accounts of foreign travellers, however, spoke of
dozens of women busy repairing sails. It was a flexible work that, when
necessary, the mistresses could subcontract. A dozen more women were
employed to prepare the oakum for caulking the ships and were paid a
higher wage, up to 30 soldi per day. In the calli and campi around the
Arsenal, we find women heads of families with less predictable jobs: a
marangona (female carpenter), a remera (female oar maker), three favre
(female blacksmiths), a cestera (female basket maker), two barilere (female
coopers) and half a dozen marinere (female sailors) (Davis 1991). They
were maybe widows defined by their husbands’ professions; however,
incidentally, it would be difficult in modern Italian to use feminine nouns
to describe these professions: marinaia (a female sailor) is perhaps the
only term recently adopted by modern Italian.
Old-regimes populations, just like today’s, were extremely mobile.
Migration is by no means an exclusively contemporary phenomenon and
its driving forces remain the same: to escape poverty, war, pestilence and
religious persecution. Economic migration, whether permanent or tem-
porary, in search of work, contrary to what we might expect, was wide-
spread even for women (Corsi 1999; Sharpe 2001; Arru et al. 2008).
However, as we shall see, there was also forced migration: in fact, even in
the early modern period, female and male slaves were a significant pres-
ence in some European cities (Angiolini 1996). Migration in search of
work could also have a religious dimension, such as in the case of those
girls from Calvinist Geneva who, in the seventeenth century, migrated to
Lyon and found work and assistance, after converting to Catholicism,
thanks to the Congregation De Propaganda Fide (Martinat 2009).
Travelling was certainly much less safe for women than men, and
women without financial resources who moved with no contacts at their
destination and no employment contract, in addition to exposing them-
selves to many risks, were regularly accused of vagrancy and prostitution.
In the sixteenth century, in some areas of the Holy Roman Empire,
unmarried women were not allowed to move to another city if they did
not have a domestic service contract, and any hotelier hosting women
travelling alone could be fined. Gradually, the limitations imposed on
working-class women who travelled in search of work were extended to
the daughters of citizens, who were forbidden, at least formally, from liv-
ing independently or, in their words, from “having their own smoke”, that
is their own hearth, and from “earning their own bread” (Wiesner 1999).
In seventeenth-century England, labouring single women were carefully
watched and when poor women migrants arrived in a town they were
rigorously removed: “parish officers seem to have put more effort into the
disposal of single women than into any other of their activities” (Hill
2001: 123). In eighteenth-century Spain, seasonal migration to Castille or
Andalucia for farm work involved thousands of men and women. However,
in 1736, the municipal authorities forbade unmarried women, even when
accompanied by relatives, and married women unaccompanied by their
husbands, to emigrate. The following decades saw a series of measures
imposed against women who emigrated dressed as men, branding them as
“perverse” for abandoning home and “spinning, weaving and sewing, and
any occupation that forces them to stay at home” (Sarasúa 2001).
The search for a better life, however, then like today, pushed many
young women to leave their homes and look for work as artisans, wet
nurses or maids. In the cities, they were often taken in by relatives or
people from their villages. Their family and geographic networks can be
reconstructed thanks to notary deeds, employment or apprenticeship
contracts, and even wills, where people coming from the same place
would often appear as guarantors, witnesses and recipients of legacies
(Bellavitis 2008; Canepari 2014).
These brief comments show quite eloquently the variety of female
occupations in early modern urban Europe. The following pages will
mostly focus on cities, large and small, and on the many jobs that women
performed there, inside and outside their homes: crafts, trade, domestic
services and occupations linked to the female body, their own and other
people’s, from midwifery to prostitution. These were activities organised
and regulated by rules and statutes, but also clandestine and unauthorised
ones, at the limit of or beyond legality, performed by women of all ages
and marital status, in urban contexts of different sizes, from the big capi-
tals to the smaller cities, from port cities engaged in international trade to
28 A. Bellavitis
small rural centres. We shall not deal with the time and rhythm of agri-
cultural work, although we must not forget that some agricultural pro-
duction took place in the cities and that many women were employed in
the cultivation of vegetable gardens or in keeping farmyard animals, for
example in monasteries and in religious and charitable institutions
(Ramiro Moya 2012). We cannot, after all, avoid investigating the rela-
tionship between the countryside and the city, for example, in terms of
immigration and mobility, or of ‘proto-industrial’ activities where the
manufacturing work of women living in villages or agricultural areas
depended on urban markets, not only on a regional but also on an inter-
national scale.
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3
Working Daughters, Wives, Mothers,
Sisters, Widows
As women’s and gender historians, the first problem we have to face is

that of sources. In quantitative sources, particularly fiscal sources and
censuses, women’s work was underrepresented. Unlike men, women were
almost always defined according to their roles in their families: as daugh-
ters, wives and widows, rather than in relation to the activities they per-
formed. This was particularly true of married women. The specific issue
of women’s working identities can be added to the more general observa-
tion that in the past just as today (and increasingly so in the context of
the economic crisis and the spread of the so-called flexible working con-
ditions, which actually hide a growing casualisation) many people, men
and women, had various relatively unskilled jobs over their lifetime and a
professional identity was a privilege relatively few people in society pos-
sessed (Bellavitis and Piccone Stella 2008). We may feel that this was
especially true of women, who even more rarely had training specific to a
profession or educational qualifications, although it should not be forgot-
ten that, in the context of manual labour or agricultural work, as many
men as women made their living from more than one job or from irregu-
lar work. The paradox, highlighted by the most recent research, is that,
even when they did not have a regular occupation and did not have what
we would today term a “permanent post”, men were more often described

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96541-3_3
32 A. Bellavitis
in fiscal and quantitative sources on the population by a precise profes-

sional identity, which has contributed to further distortion of the data
available to historians (Humphries and Sarasúa 2012).
Women’s activities were often defined in terms of ‘doing’ rather than
‘being’. For example, in the 1805 Venetian population registers, com-
piled during Austrian domination, some women’s occupations are entered
next to their names: fustagnera (fustian-weaver), revendigola (saleswoman)
and impiraressa (threader of glass beads), but there are also sentences like
“she makes shoes”, “she makes beads”, “works with linen”, “works in fash-
ion”, “spins wool” or even “she picks up paper from the streets” (Bellavitis
et al. 1990). The tendency not to define work as the intrinsic identity of
a person, but as an accessory and transient fact, can be recognised in the
definitions that women gave of themselves. In testimonies made to
Roman courts in the nineteenth century, when asked to state their work-
ing identity, the women would say “I work as a” seamstress, servant and
so on, whereas the men would declare they “were” tailors, shoemakers
and so on (Pelaja 1990). Indeed, this subtle yet profound distinction also
corresponded to roles that were effectively diversified within jobs that
could be similar in nature: being the head of a dressmaking workshop was
different from being a seamstress at home, even if it is obvious that mobil-
ity and job insecurity also characterised a large part of the male popula-
tion and that not all women performed casualised and underpaid work.
However, we cannot fail to notice that women’s tendency to construct
their own identities not through their work, but through their families,
has endured for a very long time, and is still very familiar to us today.
Censual and fiscal sources usually only recorded the occupation of
heads of households, so this information is available when women were
the heads of their households, be they widows or spinsters. In early mod-
ern German cities, between a fifth and a quarter of fiscal households had
a woman as their head, but it is not always obvious whether these women
were spinsters or widows. In Stuttgart, a tax imposed in 1545 to finance
the war against the Ottoman Empire (Türkensteuer) distinguished 11 per
cent of widows as heads of households from 3.5 per cent of women as
heads of households, whom can be assumed to have been spinsters.
Similar results can be obtained from fiscal sources from Frankfurt and
Augsburg between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the
Working Daughters, Wives, Mothers, Sisters, Widows 33
seventeenth centuries. If we consider that a girl’s marital age was between

21 and 25 in the cities and between 25 and 28 in the villages, it can be
reasonably assumed that many of the spinsters at the head of their fami-
lies would not remain unmarried indefinitely (Wiesner 1999). In the cit-
ies of Burgundy and Brittany, in the seventeenth century, between 10 and
20 per cent of heads of households were women: they were generally
craftswomen, but most were wealthy widows (Collins 1989). In Venice,
between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth
centuries, 4924 men were heads of households compared to 935 women,
of which 84 per cent (= 788) were widows; 137 prostitutes were heads of
households out of a total of 213 (Chojnacka 2001: 16, 23).
In the small Portuguese city of Vila do Conde, in the same period, fis-
cal records show an unusually high percentage of women as heads of
households: 115 out of a total of 639 fiscal households in 1568 and 300
out of 697 in 1643. Some had means, but the majority were included in
the lower band of taxpayers. Although their occupations are known in
only 21 per cent of cases in 1568 and 7.3 per cent in 1643, the explana-
tion for the high percentage of female heads of households can be found
in the occupational structure of the city, characterised by occupations
linked to the sea, such as sailors, fishermen and helmsmen, that took the
men far away from home. The percentage in nearby Porto, where the
occupational structure was more complex and not exclusively dependent
on maritime activities, was far lower: 9 per cent of women were heads of
households in 1698, compared to 43 per cent in 1634 in Vila do Conde.
In Porto, the occupations of these women were recorded in 40 per cent
of cases and were mostly trade and textile crafts (Polónia 2009).
In Warsaw, in 1781, 38 per cent of female heads of households were
without resources and a further 38 per cent were employed in a domestic
service; in Krakow, however, 22 per cent worked in retail trade and 18 per
cent in wholesale trade, figures that, in the capital, fell to 11 and 6 per
cent, respectively (Kuklo 2005).
Some censuses recorded the activities of all family members. In Turin’s
case, research on a specific profession, hairdressers, has shown that the
1705 population census shows just four women, all widows, as working
in this trade, whilst none of the female family members of the 63 master
hairdressers working in the city was recorded as such. A woman’s
34 A. Bellavitis
occupation was never recorded when she worked in the family workshop,
whereas it was more frequently recorded when women were the paid
workers of a master craftsman. This generally occurred in the textile
industry, so this is the only sector where the presence of women is, at least
partially, quantifiable, whereas the sources say nothing about the pres-
ence of women in more ‘masculine’ sectors, where they would work side
by side with their fathers and husbands. However, according to the 1690
Turin census of French nationals present in the city, almost all women
(94 out of 104) had an occupation: about half of them (46) were married
and often had children. The explanation for this discrepancy is not that
French women were more active than their Turinese counterparts, but
lies in the way in which two sources, theoretically comparable, were com-
piled (Cavallo 2006).
A very interesting census, even though it only covers some of the city’s
parishes, is the one carried out in Bologna in 1796. It recorded all family
members’ occupations and was undertaken to “find a useful occupation
and honest income for those who need it and sometimes cannot find it”.
The comparison between occupation and role in the family reveals that
68.3 per cent of female heads of households (101), 63 per cent of wives
(522) and 52.7 per cent of daughters (163) carried out paid work. A
further 38.9 per cent of female live-in relatives (129) and 62.7 per cent
of female non-related cohabitants can be added to these figures. Since
the last figure does not include the 132 women in domestic service, also
duly recorded, we can infer that they were women, often elderly and
unable to support themselves who accepted accommodation in exchange
for some service. In general, a greater presence in the labour market was
linked to precarious conditions, as is also shown by the fact that most
female workers were immigrants. All ages are represented, from 56.1 per
cent of girls under the age of 20 (out of a total of women aged over 11)
to 69.1 per cent of those aged between 41 and 50. The most common
occupation was home spinning (166 women, or 23.6 per cent), followed
by domestic work (132, or 18.8 per cent); the remaining women were
occupied in all aspects of the textile industry and, to a lesser extent, in trade
(Palazzi 1990).
Even censuses charged with recording all family members’ occupations
can, however, turn out to be incomplete. The 1802 Napoleonic census of
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Title: A voyage to Guinea, Brasil and the West Indies

in His Majesty's ships, the Swallow and Weymouth
Author: John Atkins
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Language: English
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Lately Publish’d,
In a neat Pocket Volume, Price 3s.

The Navy Surgeon: Or, A Practical System of Surgery. Illustrated
with Observations on such remarkable Cases as have occurred to
the Author’s Practice in the Royal Navy. To which is added, A
Treatise on the Venereal Disease, the Causes, Symptoms, and
Method of Cure by Mercury: An Enquiry into the Origin of that
Distemper; in which the Dispute between Dr. Dover, and Dr. Turner,
concerning Crude Mercury, is fully consider’d; with Useful Remarks
thereon. Also an Appendix, containing Physical Observations on the
Heat, Moisture, and Density of the Air on the Coast of Guinea, the
Colour of the Natives; the Sicknesses which they and the Europeans
trading thither are subject to; with a Method of Cure. By John
Atkins, Surgeon.
Printed for Ward and Chandler, at the Ship, between the Temple-Gates in Fleet-Street;
and Sold at their Shop in scarborough.
A
V O YA G E
TO
Guinea, Brasil, and the
West-Indies;
In His Majesty’s Ships, the S w a l l o w
and W e y m o u t h .
Describing the several Islands and Settlements, viz—Madeira, the Canaries, Cape
de Verd, Sierraleon, Sesthos, Cape Apollonia, Cabo Corso, and others on the
Guinea Coast; Barbadoes, Jamaica, &c. in the West-Indies.
The Colour, Diet, Languages, Habits, Manners, Customs, and Religions of the
respective Natives, and Inhabitants.
With Remarks on the Gold, Ivory, and Slave-Trade; and on the Winds, Tides
and Currents of the several Coasts.
By J O H N A T K I N S ,
Surgeon in the Royal Navy.
Illi Robur & Æs triplex

Circa Pectus erat, qui fragilem truci
Commisit Pelago Ratem
Primus——
Horat.
L O N D O N;
Printed for C æ s a r W a r d and R i c h a r d C h a n d l e r , at the Ship,
between the Temple-Gates in Fleet-Street; And Sold at their Shop in
S c a r b o r o u g h . M.DCC.XXXV.
P R E FA C E
The Publishing of this Voyage, is from a Supposition that it contains
something useful to those following in the same Track, and that it will
be no unprofitable Amusement to others who do not. I shall therefore
wave all Apology, and instead, proceed to a Reflection or two, on the
Life and Element we occupy.
And first, The Man whose Means of Subsistence irreversibly
depends on the Sea, is unhappy because he forsakes his proper
Element, his Wife, Children, Country, and Friends, all that can be
called pleasant (and of Necessity, not Choice) to tempt unknown
Dangers, on that deceitful, trackless Path; Lee Shores, Tempests,
Wants of some kind or other, bad Winds, or the rougher Passions of
our selves, are continually molesting; and if common Danger under
one adopted Parent (Neptune) does not always unite us, yet we are
still cooped like Fowls, to the same Diet and Associates.
“Till chang’d at length and to the Place conform’d
In Temper and in Nature we receive
Familiar the fierce Heat.”
Milton. B. II.
Tophet[1] with Stink of Suffolk Vaporous

Obscures the Glim; that visive and olfactive Nerves
In us feel dreadful Change.
And to compleat our ill Luck, while we are thus contending with
sinister Fate, the Rogues at home perhaps are stealing away the
Hearts of our Mistresses and Wives. Are not these a hapless Race
thus doomed!
A Sea-Life absolutely considered, had so much of Hardship and
Danger, that in King John’s Time a national Synod ordained, no
married Persons should go beyond Sea without publishing their
mutual Consent; which, I apprehend, proceeded from this
Foundation: That it should not be in the power of one to thrust
himself on Difficulties and Hazard, that would make the other equally
unhappy. The Saxons before, made a Law, that if a Merchant
crossed the wide Sea three times, he should be honoured with the
Title of Thane, (Rapin, p. 15.) and the Monarchs of the East shew
their Approbation, by still leaving the rough Dominion of it to
Christians. There are Circumstances notwithstanding, which may
abate the Infelicity, and give real Pleasure: Such chiefly in the Navy,
are a Defence of one’s Country, a Livelihood, being better manned
and provided against Dangers than Trading Ships; Good-natur’d
Officers, a mutual good Treatment, seeing the Wonders of the Deep,
and at last, maimed or decrepid, a Retreat to Superannuation, or that
noble Foundation of Greenwich-Hospital; to which of late Years must
be added, the Satisfaction Officers receive from that generous
Contribution for supporting their Widows, and consequently the
Children they may leave behind them.
This charitable Project is governed by the following Articles,
established by His present Majesty.
I.
That Widows of Commission and Warrant Officers of the Royal
Navy, shall be reputed proper Objects of the Charity, whose Annual
Incomes arising from their Real and Personal Estates, or otherwise,
do not amount to the following Sums, viz.
l. s. d.
The Widow of a Captain or Commander, 45 0 0
The Widow of a Lieutenant or Master, 30 0 0
The Widow of a Boatswain, }
Gunner, Carpenter, }
Purser, Surgeon, }
Second Master of } 20 0 0
a Yacht, or Master of a }
Naval Vessel warranted }
by the Navy Board, }
And that where any such Widow is possessed of, or interested in any
Sum of Money, the Annual Income and Produce thereof, shall be
computed and deemed, as annually yielding Three Pounds per
Centum, and no more.
II.
That to avoid Partiality and Favour in the Distribution of the
Charity, Widows of Officers of the same Rank shall have an equal
Allowance, the Proportion of which shall be fixed Annually by the
Court of Assistants, according to their Discretion; and that in order
thereunto, the said Court may distribute Annually such Part of the
Monies, arising by the said Charity, among the Widows, as they think
proper; and to lay out such other Part thereof in South-Sea
Annuities, or other Government Securities, as to them shall seem
meet, for raising a Capital Stock for the general Benefit of the
Charity, where the Application is not particularly directed by the
Donors.
III.
That in the Distribution of Allowances to poor Widows, the same
be proportionate to one another, with respect to the Sum each is to
receive, according to the following Division, viz.
The Widow of a Captain or Commander shall receive a Sum One
Third more than the Widow of a Lieutenant or Master.
The Widow of a Lieutenant or Master shall receive a Sum One
Third more than the Widow of a Boatswain, Gunner, Carpenter,
Purser, Surgeon, Second Master of a Yacht, or Master of a Naval
Vessel Warranted by the Navy Board.
IV.
That Widows admitted to an Annual Allowance from the Charity,
shall begin to enjoy it from the First Day of the Month following the
Decease of their Husbands, provided they apply within Twelve
Months for the same; otherwise, from the Time of their Application.
V.
That if any Widow, admitted to the Charity, marries again, her
Allowance from thenceforth shall cease.
VI.
That in order to prevent Abuses, no Widow shall be admitted to
the Benefit of the Charity, who has not been married for the Space of
Twelve Months to the Officer by whose Right she claims the same,
unless the said Officer was killed or drowned in the Sea Service. And
if any Officer marries after the Age of Seventy Years, his Widow shall
be deemed unqualified to receive the Charity.
VII.
That if the Widow of an Officer lives in the Neighbourhood of any
of His Majesty’s Dock-Yards, the Commissioner of the Navy residing
there, and some of the Principal Officers of the Yard, or the said
Officers of the Yard, where there is no Commissioner, shall inform
themselves thoroughly of the Circumstances of the Deceased; and
being satisfied that the Widow comes within the Rules of the Charity,
shall sign and give her the following Certificate gratis, viz.
These are to certify the Court of Assistants for managing the
Charity for Relief of Poor Widows of Commission and Warrant
Officers of the Royal Navy, That A. B. died on the _________ and
has left the Bearer C. B. a Widow; and according to the best
Information we can get from others, and do really believe ourselves,
is not possessed of a clear annual Income to the Value of
___________ and therefore she appears to us to be entituled to the
Benefit of the said Charity under their Direction.
Besides which, the Widow is to make Affidavit, that her Annual
Income is not better than is expressed in the said Certificate, and
that she was legally married (naming the Time when, and the Place
where) to the Officer, in whose Right she claims the Benefit of the
Charity.
VIII.
That if the Widow resides in any other Part of his Majesty’s
Dominions, a Certificate of the like Nature is to be signed by the
Minister of the Parish, a Justice of the Peace, and two or more
Officers of the Navy, who are best acquainted with her
Circumstances; and she is to make such Affidavit as is before
mentioned.
IX.
That all Widows applying for the Benefit of the Charity, are to
make Affidavit, that they are unmarried.
X.
That Widows admitted to the Charity shall once in every Year, at
the Time that shall be appointed, bring to the Court of Assistants
their Affidavits, containing a particular State of their Circumstances,
and that they continue unmarried.
XI.
That Widows of Masters and Surgeons are to apply to the Navy
Office, and receive from thence a Certificate of the Quality of their
Husbands in the Navy, which shall be given them Gratis, before they
apply to the Court of Assistants, to be admitted to the Charity.
XII.
That no Officer or Servant employed in the Business or Service of
this Charity, shall receive any Salary, Reward, or other Gratuity, for
his Pains or Service in the Affairs of the said Charity, but that the
whole Business thereof shall be transacted Gratis.
Secondly, Of the different Seas we traverse.

The Mediterranean, from the Climate, Fertility, and Beauty of the
Countries bordering on it, claims the Preference, I think, of all Seas;
and recompenses more largely the Fatigues of a Voyage. What is
peculiar, and makes them more than others pleasant, is, First, the
Temperature of their Air, neither too hot nor cold, but a pleasant
Mediocrity, that is, Spring or Summer all the Year. Secondly, Being of
a moderate Compass: A Man by a little conversing with Maps, fixes
an Idea of his Distances, his Stages from Place to Place, and may
measure them over in his Head with the same Facility he would a
Journey from London to York. Thirdly, Thus acquainted with the daily
Progress, our Approaches please in a Proportion to the Danger and
Wants we go from, and the Remedy and Port we go to. Leghorn,
Genoa, Naples, &c. have their different Beauties. Fourthly, The
confining Lands on the European and African Side being
mountainous, and the Sea interspersed with Islands, gives these
Priorities to main Oceans, viz. that you cannot be long out of sight of
some Land or other, and those flowing with Milk and Honey, no
ordinary Comfort, excepting when they are Lee Shores. Secondly, If
the Hills be to Windward, they take off the Force of strong Winds,
and make a smooth Sea. And thirdly, The same Hills to Leeward, do
by their Height give a Check to Storms; the Air stagnating by their
Interposition, I have observed frequently in shore, to become a
gentle Gale.
Lastly, The greatest Pleasure of those Seas, is visiting Towns and
Countrys that have been worthy History; the most famous do
somewhere or other border there, and have given birth to the
greatest Men and greatest Actions. Greece, that was the Mother of
Arts and Sciences, the Oracle of the World, that brought forth a
Homer, Socrates, Alexander, &c. and was one of the four great
Empires, stands to those Seas (though changed now to European
Turky, by a Progress as wonderful) so does Italy, the Seat of the last
universal Empire. That Rome, which subjected almost all the Kings
and Kingdoms of the known World, gave Britain Laws, and left every
where eternal Monuments of their Power and Magnificence: Here
lived Virgil, Horace, Cæsar——Hither some say St. Paul made his
Voyage, having coasted along Crete, and suffered Shipwreck at
Malta, Islands famous here, the one being the Birth-place of Jupiter,
the other for a renowned Order of Knights, the professed Defenders
of Christianity against the Turk.
Volcanos, Catacombs, Triumphal Arches, and Pillars, Baths,
Aqueducts, and Amphitheatres, are peculiar Curiosities of Italy.
There is scarcely a Spot in that delicious Country, but is recorded for
some remarkable Occurrence; is memorable for High-ways, Grottos,
Lakes, Statues, Monuments, some Victory gained, or Battle lost, the
Birth or Death of Cæsar or his Friends. On the African Side, stands
or did stand, Carthage, Troy, Tyre, Nice, Ephesus, Antioch, Smyrna;
and on that shore was once Christianity firmly planted (no less than
300 Bishops being expelled thence;) but alas how all things change!
neither Greatness nor Virtue can exempt from Mortality: Towns,
Countries, and Religions, have their Periods.
Thebes, Nineveh, &c. are now no more.
Oppida posse mori,
Si quæras Helicen & Burin, Achaidas Urbes,
Invenies sub Aquis.
They have a determined Time to flourish, decay, and die in. Corn
grows where Troy stood: Carthage is blotted out. Greece and her
Republicks (Athens, Sparta, Corinth,) with other fam’d Asian and
African Cities the Turkish Monarchy has overturned. Their
Magnificence, Wealth, Learning, and Worship, is changed into
Poverty and Ignorance; and Rome, the Mother of all, overrun with
Superstition. Who, on the one hand, but feels an inexpressible
Pleasure in treading over that Ground, he supposes such Men
inhabited, whose Learning and Virtues have been the Emulation of
all succeeding Ages? And who again but must mourn such a
melancholly Transposition of the Scene, and spend a few funeral
Reflections over such extraordinary Exequiæ: Perhaps the
Revolution of as many Ages, as has sunk their Glory, may raise it
again, or carry it to the Negroes and Hottentots, and the present
Possessors be debased.
The next pleasant Sailing to the Mediterranean, is that part of the
Atlantick, Southern, Pacifick, South, or Indian Seas, that are within
the Limits of a Trade-Wind; because such Winds are next to
invariable, of such moderate Strength as not to raise heavy Seas, or
strain a Ship; no Storms at Distance from Land; and equal Days and
Nights.
The Atlantick, and Southern Ocean, without the Limits of this
Trade-Wind, that is, from 30 to 60°° of Latitude, are far the worst for
Navigation; wide, rough, and boisterous Seas, more subject to
Clouds, Storm, and Tempest, variable Weather; long, dark, cold
Nights, and less delightful Countries and Climates out of Europe.
Lastly, Beyond 60 Degrees of Latitude we have little Commerce,
and the Seas less frequented; the Countries growing more and more
inhospitable, as Latitude and Cold increases towards the Pole;
however, Men who have used Greenland, tell me, those inclement
Skies contain no other Vapors, than Mist, Sleet, and Snow; the Sea
less ruffled with Winds, which blow for the most part Northerly,
towards the Sun, i. e. towards a more rarified Air, seen in those Drifts
of Ice from thence, that are found far to the Southward, both on the
European and American side. Another Advantage to cheer the
Winter’s Melancholy of Northern Regions, is the Moon’s shining a
Length proportioned to the Absence of the Sun; so that where he is
entirely lost, she[2] never sets, but with reflected and resplendent
Light on Ice and Snow, keeps up their Consolation.
In all Seas are met numerous Incidents and Appearances, worthy
our Reflection. I have therefore gone on to Observations more
instructive and amusing. If the Solutions are not every where
Standard, they may strike out Hints to better Capacities; among
those, I can perceive two more liable to Objection.
First, The Pythagorean Soliloquy I set out with (p. 18.) which may
be deemed too foreign for the Subject: To which I answer——A
Voyage to Sea is a Type of that dark and unknown one we are to
make in Death: Wherefore it is not unnatural with a Departure from
the Land’s End of England, shooting into an Abyss of Waters, to
consider a little on that Life, which lost is a Departure from the
World’s End, and to launch into a greater Abyss, Eternity;—The
Principle, in what is material of us, I think, highly consonant to
Reason, and continues still the Doctrine of the Eastern Sages.
Diversæ autem corpora formæ non sunt nisi diversæ modificationes
ejusdem materiæ, &c.
(Keil de legibus naturæ.)
E. G. Vapors condensed to Rain, we see descend on Earth; and
both enter and pass into the Seeds and Forms of all Plants. From
them, either taken alone, or amassed in animal Food, is what
constitutes and repairs by a daily Eating, our own Bodies; which if
there be any Trust to Sense or Reason, moulds, decays, and turns
again to Dust and Air, in order for Regeneration.
What only can destroy this Philosophy (as I observe at that place)
and maintain a Resurrection of the same Body, is Revelation, and
the Immortality of the Soul; for Sameness, or Identity then, will not
consist in the same individual Particles being united, that makes our
Bodies here, (which we are sure are continually fluctuating, and
changing while we live;) but on that Consciousness which the
immaterial Part will give, though joined to Matter, taken from the Top
of Olympus.
Secondly, The Denial of Canibals against the Authority of grave
Authors, has proceeded from a Persuasion, that the Charge carries
the highest Reproach on Humanity, and the Creator of it. My Aim,
therefore, was to shew in the best manner I could, that the
Accusation every where has probably proceeded from Fear in some,
to magnify the Miracle of escaping an inhospitable and strange
Country, and from Design in others, to justify Dispossession, and
arm Colonies with Union and Courage against the supposed
Enemies of Mankind. Conquest and Cruelty, by that means go on
with pleasure on the People’s side, who are persuaded they are only
subduing of brutish Nature, and exchanging, for their mutual Good,
Spiritual for Temporal Inheritances. By particular and private
Men, this may have been fixed on a People, to allay some base or
villainous Actions of their own, that could not any other way be
excused, or bear the Light: And for this, I appeal to the discerning
part of our Traders, acquainted with Guinea, whether they do not
think the Reports of Cape St. Mary’s Inhabitants, Cape Mont,
Montzerado, Drewin, and Callabar, down-right Falsities, and
impolitick ones; for the multiplying of Places, like Plots, in a great
measure destroys the Use of them.
At the Caribbees again, it is full as preposterous; for on small
Islands, had their Women bred like Rabbits, they must have been
desolated Ages before the Europeans Arrival; unless we can
suppose human Flesh was eat only on their Feast-Days; or that they
just commenced Monsters upon our Discovery.——La Hontan, or
some other French Translation I have read, talking of Canibals
bordering on Canada, flies into a strange Gallicism, and makes them
commend the Flesh of a Frenchman (sad Partiality) in Eating, as of
finer Taste than that of an Englishman.
These, with Europeans neglecting to charge the East-Indians thus,
who have more Power than simple Americans or Negroes to resent
the Indignity and Reproach, makes me disbelieve the whole of what I
have hitherto heard; and that the true Anthropophagi are only the
diverse Insects infesting us in diverse Countries; the Pediculose Kind
do not live in hot Climates; instead thereof, they are assaulted with a
ravenous Fly called Muskito; Legions that live wild in the Woods, and
seize with every Opportunity, human Flesh, like Lions.
As there is a strict Regard to Truth observed throughout the whole,

it is apprehended the following Sheets will be not only amusing, but
useful.
A
V O YA G E
TO
Guinea, Brasil, and the West-Indies;

In His Majesty’s Ships, the Swallow,
and Weymouth, &c.
We took in eight Months Provisions each, at Portsmouth; Stores,
Careening-Geer, and Necessaries requisite to continue us a double
Voyage down the Coast of Guinea, for meeting, if possible, with the
Pyrates; who did then very much infest those Parts, and destroy our
Trade and Factories. Accordingly the Company’s Governors for
Gambia and other Places, embark’d under our Convoy, and were to
have what Support we could give them, in restoring the Credit of the
Royal African Company; which begun now to take new life under the
Influence of the Duke of Chandois.
For this Purpose we set sail from Spithead February 5th, 1720/1.
It is a Pleasure we have beyond the Merchant-Service in sailing,
that we are forbid Commerce. When Men of War have no other
Lading than Provisions and Necessaries, the Duty of Sailors is
eased, and their Conveniencies better; whereas Cargoes, besides
dishonouring the Commission, and unfitting the King’s Ships for
Action, stifle and sicken a Ship’s Company in warm Climates,
impose hard Services, and spoil the Trade of the Merchant they are
designed to encourage, and expect a Gratuity from; because Labour
and Freight free, they can afford to undersel.

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Womens Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe 1St Ed Edition Anna Bellavitis All Chapter

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Women’s Work and Rights in Early

Modern Urban Europe 1st ed. Edition

Women’s Work and

Based on a translation from the Italian language edition:

ISBN 978-3-319-96540-6 ISBN 978-3-319-96541-3 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018954064

Cover illustration: Granger Historical Picture Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

g­ enerally, to play a significant role in the economy, not to mention biol-

modern Europe is now extensive and it would be impossible to sum-

Rouen, France Anna Bellavitis

Simonton, D. (Ed.). (2006). The Routledge History of Women in Europe Since

Part I Women, Work, Rights and the City 1

1 Women Have Always Worked 3

2 The Gender of Work 19

3 Working Daughters, Wives, Mothers, Sisters, Widows 31

4 The ‘Decline Thesis’ and the Guilds: An ‘Accordion

5 From Globalisation to Industrialisation 57

6 Agency and Capabilities: North Versus South? 69

7 The Right to Learn, the Right to Teach: Intellectual and

Part II Women’s Jobs 109

8 Servants and Slaves 111

9 Caring and Feeding 129

Part III Workshops and Markets 169

12 Learning at Home and on the Shop Floor 171

13 Women, Families, Guilds and the French Exception 183

14 Silk and Skill 197

16 In the Market Place 219

Part IV Conclusions 251

18 Conclusion: Changes and Continuity 253

In the next chapters, we shall examine in detail the development of wom-

© The Author(s) 2018 3

bargaining, negotiation and domination as well as consensus about what

The authors used the words “negotiation”, “bargaining” and “conflict”,

In addition to the concept of ‘agency’, recent research developments in

assess this work economically, unless we can establish an equivalence with

by the authorities, within a moral economy aimed at protecting the weak-

who proposed the existence of a link between the so-called European

more general discussion on the respective advantages to economic devel-

In the last decades, in the field of economic history, and in particular

production of monographs, collections of essays and articles on women’s

geois society of nineteenth-century England has given rise to important

agriculture and the industrial development that led to increasingly impor-

Davidson, C. (1982). A Woman’s Work Is Never Done: A History of Housework in

Groppi, A. (1996b). Lavoro e proprietà delle donne in età moderna. In A. Groppi

Montenach, A. (Ed.). (2012). Agency: un concept opératoire dans les études de

© The Author(s) 2018 19

opportunity, almost no job had a fixed and permanent gender identity

identity, according to what the Strasbourg midwives declared in 1584

Palazzi, M. (1990). “Tessitrici, serve, treccole”. Donne, lavoro e famiglia a

As women’s and gender historians, the first problem we have to face is

© The Author(s) 2018 31

in fiscal and quantitative sources on the population by a precise profes-

seventeenth centuries. If we consider that a girl’s marital age was between

Title: A voyage to Guinea, Brasil and the West Indies

Author: John Atkins

Release date: November 12, 2023 [eBook #72102]

Original publication: London: printed for Caesar Ward and

Credits: Peter Becker, John Campbell and the Online Distributed

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A VOYAGE

In a neat Pocket Volume, Price 3s.

Illi Robur & Æs triplex

Tophet[1] with Stink of Suffolk Vaporous

Secondly, Of the different Seas we traverse.

g enerally, to play a significant role in the economy, not to mention biol-

Rouen, France Anna Bellavitis

Part I Women, Work, Rights and the City 1

1 Women Have Always Worked 3

2 The Gender of Work 19

3 Working Daughters, Wives, Mothers, Sisters, Widows 31

4 The ‘Decline Thesis’ and the Guilds: An ‘Accordion

5 From Globalisation to Industrialisation 57

6 Agency and Capabilities: North Versus South? 69

7 The Right to Learn, the Right to Teach: Intellectual and

Part II Women’s Jobs 109

8 Servants and Slaves 111

9 Caring and Feeding 129

Part III Workshops and Markets 169

12 Learning at Home and on the Shop Floor 171

13 Women, Families, Guilds and the French Exception 183

14 Silk and Skill 197

16 In the Market Place 219

Part IV Conclusions 251

18 Conclusion: Changes and Continuity 253