Gender equality in the work organization of a company town: The case of San Leucio (late 18th–early 19th century)

Introduction

San Leucio was a company town focused on the production of luxury silks. Its historical distinctiveness lay not only in its uniqueness in the late 18th-century landscape, but also in its exclusive legislation, which made this small territory adjoining the Royal Palace of Caserta a kind of autonomous company town within the Bourbon boundaries. The Ferdinandopolis project, which was never completed, was to transform San Leucio into a city in which architecture and labor organization coincided to stimulate the achievement of a well-being shared by all settlers, men and women. In addition, the road to this end had to forcibly transit through full protection of fundamental rights for the individual, starting with housing, health, labor protection, and school and family education (Cringoli and Pomella, 2023).

King Ferdinand’s code (San Leucio Code, enacted in 1789), probably composed by Planelli, an Enlightenment intellectual close to the Neapolitan court, tended to create those prerequisites for the achievement of collective happiness, an ideal expressed in various declinations by Genovesi and Filangieri (Fusco, 2009; Passetti, 2009; Rao, 2018; Villari, 1970), through the coincidence of ideal and material order. Articles of the Code that invoke the right to happiness, collective welfare, and cooperation derive from the works of the two southern intellectuals, who, starting from ethical roots, promoted a new idea of economics, which was distinct from what emerged in Anglo-Saxon lands in the 19th century; from J.S. Mill onward, namely, the vision of ‘homo oeconomicus’, to the rationality of the individual, the Neapolitan Enlightenment contrasted the possibility of sharing well-being together, with the full satisfaction of material needs as the means to achieve happiness. Principles that should be placed within the long-standing tradition of ‘modernization from above’ that from the beginning of the Enlightenment season, initiated by Gaetano Filangieri and Antonio Genovesi, characterized potential reform projects in the Kingdom of Naples and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies that were never realized. The strength of Filangieri and Genovesi’s economic thought lies in this: happiness is such only if it is shared and, consequently, well-being can only be collective, otherwise, we would be talking about individual self-interest that overrides the achievement of others’ happiness. A view, in many ways, similar to the concept of ‘sympathy’ with which Adam Smith described the innate tendency of every man to live in society, contributing to general development (Cringoli and Pomella, 2024). In addition, that sharing of happiness was also supposed to concern the female gender. It is no coincidence that among the greatest admirers of Filangieri and Genovesi’s ideas, which promoted female education as an element of victory over the obscurantist past, was Eleonora Pimentel Fonseca, an animator of Neapolitan cultural circles in the late 18th century and a leading figure in the Neapolitan revolution of 1799 that led to the establishment of the Republic, as well as an open propagandist of the ideas of the Neapolitan Enlightenment (Orefice, 2019). Pimentel Fonseca was one of the victims of the counterrevolutionary repression after the Bourbons regained power, as she was also identified as the cultural soul of that revolutionary act in her function as editor of the ‘Monitore Napoletano’, the official organ of the provisional republican government. Her position as a ‘woman’ intellectual and revolutionary, who had conquered centuries of cultural repression through education, turned her into a chosen victim of anti-Republican violence, which did not allow such an attempt to break with custom, as also demonstrated against other women who took part in the 1799 riots: sources describe several female soldiers leading battalions that took the fortresses of the city of Naples, and who were brutalized after the arrival of the Sanfedist army (Gargano, 1998; Grardon, 2000). The activities of all these women, Pimentel in the lead, are a practical manifestation of the reflections of the Neapolitan Enlightenment in its most mature version: women’s emancipation, conscious participation in the political and cultural life of the territory are the synthesis of the realization of the Enlightenment ideal in Southern Italy, in a context in which gender discrimination was culturally entrenched in all social classes, from the people to the nobility; in Naples, many educande became nuns and conservatories turned into monasteries. Education was limited to the so-called ‘feminine arts’ and Christian doctrine, contributing to the growing misery, as well as to the inertia of the authorities:

women were relegated within the walls of the home or the monastery, and therefore, if among the exponents of the male sex there was the enormous gap between the high culture of the few and the ignorance of the masses, in the female world illiteracy and ignorance reigned supreme. (Illibato, 1985)

The combination of these prerequisites, translated in a material sense, led San Leucio to become an excellent laboratory for the formation of human capital; schooling, literacy, and work led the settlers to become fully aware of their potential and status, so much so that after national unification they demanded that certain prerogatives of their autonomy be maintained, through a formal letter sent to the new Italian parliament to claim the formation of a municipality of San Leucio detached from the neighboring and more important municipality of Caserta.

The case of San Leucio is therefore emblematic for several reasons: a code of laws transformed a small village into an enclave that maintained its administrative autonomy but, as Pietro Colletta testifies, ¹ was to be replicated in other regions of the Kingdom. Within it, industrial production was managed jointly by the various citizens, with an organizational project that indirectly led to the formation of human capital from a social, productive, and cultural point of view. Furthermore, in the Leucian experience, there was a persistent co-protagonism between the sovereign’s intendants and the workers, defined as artisans by the Code, and what could be considered an internal ‘colony’ of the Kingdom represented the only example of a publicly managed company town in European history.

San Leucio was a project in which substantial gender equality in the performance of professional duties was enshrined in law: women and men cooperated in the production of high-quality silks in the Royal Factory and the Royal Company, destined for national and continental markets, and other silk products for a parallel market, with the full cooperation of all family members who worked hard to offer the nearest markets high-quality products at a lower price, in order to increase family income and diversify consumption strategies.

The San Leucio Code

When the sovereign gave the Leucian Code, entitled ‘Le leggi pel buon governo per la popolazione di S. Leucio’, to print, he also institutionalized certain practices that were naturally emerging within the founding nucleus of San Leucio: a tendency toward industriousness, a push for cooperation among families, and Christianity as a moral reference point. This original hybridization of confessional and Enlightenment elements makes the Leucian Code a document of great historical relevance, both for an in-depth study of the intellectual vitality of 18th-century Naples and for an analysis of society, material culture, and the organization of labor in the Leucian company town. Furthermore, historical research shows that it was King Ferdinand’s wife, Maria Carolina of Habsburg, daughter of Maria Theresa of Austria, who, together with her brothers Joseph and Leopold, inherited the inclination toward enlightened absolutism that guided her mother’s power that inspired the proclamation of the Code. The queen wanted to make Naples a center of culture and promoted an attempt at administrative and bureaucratic renewal that often clashed with the court circles most resistant to change (Francovich, 2013), at least until 1789. In fact, after learning the news from France, with the revolution and, above all, the beheading of the sovereign’s family, Maria Carolina changed her policy, supporting the forces of reaction against those upheavals that were challenging the established social order.

More than two centuries after 1789, when Ferdinand IV promulgated the Leucian Code, the text shows aspects that are still not fully understood. The first 10 pages of the Code are a kind of programmatic address, in which the sovereign describes his relationship with the site (which in 1789 had 134 inhabitants) and how over time the conditions had been determined to achieve there a self-sufficient economic community based on the textile industry, thanks to an excellent habitat for the cultivation of mulberry trees, the food of silkworms (Plunz, 2023); in addition, the construction of the Carolinian aqueduct ensured the water supply in the colony.

Ferdinand IV had made sure to attract skilled and experienced weavers from other regions of Italy and from countries beyond the Alps to the company town and, with substantial public capital, he would propose San Leucio as a production model to be exported later throughout the Kingdom. This program is inferred from a small volume published in 1791 and recently rediscovered by Battista Marello, a scholar of local history in the Caserta area. In Marello’s opinion, Ferdinand IV would have applied the ‘San Leucio solution’ to the Capital and to the whole Kingdom, modernizing it in its social and productive structures. ² The project, however, was unfeasible because of the Kingdom’s far insufficient financial resources, and the mere hypothesis of extending the model to the entire territory of southern Italy also manifests limited experience in administrative management on the part of the ruler.

The Code is divided into five chapters, laced with varying numbers of paragraphs according to subsequent reissues. The first chapter is that of ‘Negative Duties’, all those rules that prescribe ‘the obligation not to offend anyone in Person, in stuff, in reputation’, without gender discrimination. The second of ‘Positive Duties’, that is, the rules based on respect for one’s neighbor and toward political and moral institutions, such as ‘the Sovereign, Ministers, Ecclesiastics, Spouses, Parents, Children, Brothers, Benefactors, Elders, Youth, and the Fatherland’. The third chapter is that of ‘Employment’ (the labor), the fourth of ‘Foreign Artists’ (workers), and the fifth ‘of General Punishments Offenders’. A careful rereading of the Code reveals that we are dealing with laws that, for the first time in modern history, protect the figure and role of women at a social, cultural, and professional level. The second chapter of the Code, in fact, sanctioned a society based on merit, without any distinction of sex or social status: ‘Merit alone forms distinction among the Individuals of San Leucio. Perfect equality in dress. Absolute prohibition contra luxury’ (meritocracy in work and family is the only element that distinguishes human beings) (Ferdinand, 1789). Gender equality was also enshrined in terms of wages, with differences due only to the degree of responsibility of the job, not according to gender. There was no shortage of attempts by some Manufacturing Directors to cut wages to contain operating costs, especially since it must be remembered that the San Leucio company town experiment from a financial point of view was perpetually in deficit. However, Ferdinand IV opposed cutting wages for budgetary reasons, especially in favor of women workers (Battisti, 1977), because he understood San Leucio not as a company aimed at making profits, but as a model of education in work and respect for secular and spiritual authorities.

In the ‘Particular Duties’ section we find the regulations on marriage. Women are free to choose their husbands, as it is indicated that ‘in the choice not to mix the parents point, but be free of the young’ (the relatives of the two young people must be excluded from the choice of marriage, as they are free to form sentimental bonds as they wish) (Ferdinand, 1789: XXV).

San Leucio: Gender, labor, and modernity. San Leucio in dialogue with historiography

The case of San Leucio offers a peculiar perspective for understanding gender dynamics in the context of the early modern age, but its historical significance becomes clearer when placed in relation to the main strands of gender literature. In this regard, the studies of Merry Wiesner-Hanks (1993), particularly her Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, and Louise Tilly with Joan W. Scott’s (1989) Women, Work, and Family, which showed how gender relations transformed in parallel with economic and productive changes, can be very useful. In particular, analysis of the division of labor between men and women in proto-industrial and industrial settings revealed that gender norms were not just a consequence of work, but an inherent structure that determined who could do what, with what economic value, and with what social recognition (Tilly and Scott, 1989; Wiesner-Hanks, 1993).

A comparative approach on the status of women within the processes of industrialization in the United Kingdom can emerge with the reading of the volume Women’s History: Britain, 1850–1945, edited by June Purvis (1997), and the volume Women and Work in Britain since 1840 by Gerry Hollowey (2005). These two very important works are representative of a vast literature on the subject that it would be impossible to cite all, which has evolved exponentially numerically and thematically over the past three decades. What emerges from Purvis and Holloway’s work is a consideration of how factors such as social class, age, marital status, ethnicity of membership, and geographic location, as well as basic economic and political conditions, have weighed on women’s employment opportunities and social status over the past two centuries. In addition, it must be considered that the traditional narrative of the phenomenon of industrialization and the economic changes that have occurred over the past two and a half centuries has tended to be a predominantly ‘male’ narrative, which has rendered women’s contribution in the putting-out system and in actual industry almost invisible, due in part to documentary leaks. This has emerged through the studies of Jane Humphries, Pat Hudson, and other scholars who have proposed a retraining of the analysis of women’s labor in proto-industrial and industrial settings, highlighting women’s active involvement beyond stereotypical traditional gender models (Horrell and Humphries, 1995; Hudson, 1995, 2011; Humphries, 1990; Humphries and Sarasúa, 2012; Humphries and Weisdorf, 2015).

A gender study about the San Leucio experience is fully situated in this general rethinking of women’s roles in proto-industrial society and is characterized by elements of radical novelty. The San Leucio experience represents a concrete example of how an ancient regime royal authority could attempt to institutionalize a more egalitarian view of gender roles, at least in its intentions. At a time when most working women were trapped in low-paid, unprotected jobs, San Leucio offered access to basic education and a system that regulated wages and working conditions. This element in part resonates with the research of Ivy Pinchbeck (1969), Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850, who first highlighted how industrialization brought opportunities but also new forms of exploitation for women. San Leucio did not escape these contradictions but differed in its effort to recognize women’s contributions to silk manufacturing. Placing the case of San Leucio in the broader landscape of gender literature thus allows us to see how this Bourbon community did not simply represent an isolated utopia, but a social laboratory in which in daily practice and through labor fundamental questions about the relationship between gender, labor and power were ‘redefined’. Following Tilly and Scott’s reasoning, San Leucio could be interpreted as an example of a ‘social construction of gender’ that, even within its limitations, challenged some of the patriarchal norms of the time, offering a privileged field of observation for understanding the economic and cultural transformations that affected women’s lives in the transition to modernity.

The literature on the gendered division of labor, well represented by the aforementioned contributions of Pinchbeck, Tilly, and Scott, points out that industrialization often exacerbated inequalities between men and women, relegating the latter to lower-skilled and lower-paid jobs. Pinchbeck argues that the introduction of textile factories, while bringing many women into the manufacturing sector, perpetuated an unfavorable wage hierarchy and left women workers with tasks considered less technical and of less economic value (Pinchbeck, 1969: 45). Tilly and Scott (1989), for their part, have shown that even in proto-industrial economies the sexual division of labor was not just a simple distribution of tasks, but the result of social norms that assigned specific roles to women, often confining them to the domestic sphere or to poorly paid jobs (pp.16–20). Within this framework, San Leucio stands out as an interesting example: the Code represents a conscious attempt to formalize the role of women as an integral part of the workforce. The technical training required of women in San Leucio to work in silk production, from spinning operations to the more complex weaving stages, was formally recognized as a key element of the community’s success. This attempt to integrate women into a regulated economy distinguished San Leucio from the predominant model of patriarchal industrialization. In the cotton mills and spinning mills of the British Industrial Revolution, for example, women were often considered as cheap labor. In San Leucio, on the other hand, women’s training and professionalism were explicitly valued elements, albeit within a system that did not fully disrupt male power structures. Limited as it is, the San Leucio experience fits into a gendered literature exploring exceptions and alternatives to the industrial model as it was being configured. Studies such as Sheila Rowbotham’s (1973) Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight Against It and the aforementioned Merry Wiesner-Hanks have shown that although most early industrial experiences reproduced gender inequalities, there were instances in which more inclusive forms of labor organization were experimented with. San Leucio, with its attempt to regulate and value women’s contributions, can be read as one such case: not a fully accomplished equalitarian revolution, but a significant deviation from a pattern in which gender rigidly determined labor opportunities and value.

Gender literature has often emphasized the ‘double load’ borne by women, that is, the combination of paid work and domestic work that characterized, and in some respects still characterizes, their lives in modern and contemporary times. Tilly and Scott (1989) analyzed how women in working families found themselves balancing long hours spent in cotton mills or spinning mills with domestic responsibilities. Rowbotham (1973) also pointed out that the transition to an industrial economy did not free women from domestic work, but made their overall burden even heavier, as a working day in the mills was compounded by housework. In San Leucio, women were never completely relieved of the work of domestic care and management, but the community context introduced forms of support that were nonexistent elsewhere; in addition, Leucian women also assumed an important role in managing family consumption strategies and managing domestic silk production. The establishment of free schools for workers’ children in the Code represented a concrete help for mothers, allowing them to work without the constant burden of having to care for their children throughout the day. In addition, the Code provided some protections in an attempt to reconcile (as much as possible) women’s ‘double burden’: from double burden, then, came ‘double responsibility’, a step ahead of the living and working conditions in the coeval industrial cities, where women had neither access to free schools nor any specific regulations to protect them. This dynamic fits into the strand of historiography analyzing early forms of community welfare. An exception to the context is analyzed by Eric Hobsbawm (1968) in Industry and Empire, who notes that in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, state policies had not yet intervened to guarantee social rights or supports for workers. In this regard, San Leucio can be seen as an anticipatory laboratory, a case in which state authority (in this case King Ferdinand IV) sought to implement a support system at least partially directed toward alleviating social inequalities between men and women. However, as noted by Merry Wiesner-Hanks (1993), such innovations rarely fundamentally altered domestic power dynamics. Leucian women, although supported by community organizing, were not fully emancipated from traditional roles in a model that sought to integrate, with the aforementioned ‘double responsibility’ model – rather than eliminate – the double burden.

In sum, San Leucio does not represent a complete overcoming of gender inequalities, but an innovative example, especially in relation to women’s conditions in the Kingdom, of legislation aimed at eliminating many of the pressures that burdened women. The presence of free educational facilities and specific regulations for women’s work indicates an attempt to balance productivity and care, reconfiguring the persistent hierarchies and gender divisions still dominant. The San Leucio Code is often considered as one of the first explicit codifications that attempted to regulate gender relations in an industrial community. However, Joan Wallach Scott (1986) in Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis and Merry Wiesner-Hanks (1993) have shown how the introduction of official norms on women’s status represents a terrain of contradiction. On the one hand, the formalization of gender norms makes women’s work visible, guarantees minimum protections, and allows for the inclusion, albeit partial, of women in the regulated economy. On the other, these same norms crystallize predefined gender roles and reproduce power hierarchies, perpetuating inequalities. San Leucio, in this sense, is no exception. It could be argued that the San Leucio Code sanctioned a kind of reformism, in which women were integrated into an orderly production system guaranteed by royal authority, but without challenging in form the existing power relations. As Sheila Rowbotham (1973) points out in Hidden from History, the recognition of women in the productive and public spheres, without a corresponding downsizing of power inequalities, does not lead to real emancipation. San Leucio, while improving conditions for women workers relative to the average of the time, did not disrupt the broader patriarchal framework.

Gender and economic history studies have often examined particular social and industrial experiments to illustrate broader processes of construction and renegotiation of gender roles. Among these, the Fourierist phalansteries in France, the Owensian cooperative communities in Britain and the United States, and the proto-industrial rural manufactories of central and northern Europe have been analyzed as examples of places where attempts were made to reorganize work and family life. The relevant literature, which includes the contributions of Carl Guarneri’s (1991), The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America and Barbara Taylor’s (1983), Eve and the New Jerusalem, has shown how these experiments constituted spaces of social experimentation, sometimes providing opportunities for women to break out of the rigid confines of traditional domestic work. In this sense, San Leucio becomes a privileged lens for observing the workings of broader social and economic mechanisms. The most recent studies (Cringoli and Pomella, 2024) point out that the reforms implemented in the Bourbon community not only responded to practical needs of production, but also reflected a political and cultural project that, although limited, hinted at possibilities of inclusion for women in the state-regulated economy. In this sense, the San Leucio rules foreshadowed some of the dynamics that would later emerge with greater intensity only in the 20th century, such as the formalization of women’s work responsibilities and the need for institutions that supported the double burden of working women. Therefore, the case of San Leucio fits within a historiographical strand that studies social ‘microcosms’ in order to gain a deeper understanding of how gender was constructed and renegotiated in different historical eras; in addition, San Leucio is not just a geographic exception, but a case study that contributes to the broader historiographical debate on the processes of economic inclusion and redefinition of gender roles in the modern age.

Gender equality in the labor context

While the Real Fabbrica did not tend toward capitalist aims, it had a corporate structure and internal organization chart that was anything but antiquated. The management methods were cutting-edge, and a few figures worked in the context, making the whole experiment also a school for a potential professional bourgeoisie that, in the Mezzogiorno of the time, was struggling to establish itself in a society made up mainly of the ‘popolo minuto’ and large landowners. Examples of the professional figures present in San Leucio can be discerned from the documents of the Plan of the Royal Administration of San Leucio of 1815–1816, when, having put behind it the period of exile due to the French decade, the crown had also regained its authority over the colony. ³ Some employees oversaw managing the entire site; others were divided between the Royal Factory and the farm. In 1815 the superintendent of San Leucio was the Duke of Miranda; for his services as liaison between the colony and the crown he received a ‘mensural soldo’ of 180 ducats: his task was one of control and administration, acting in the sovereign’s stead. He was obliged to relate continuously with the king on the affairs of Leucian and the rest of the surrounding territory, assessing both the production of the site and the lifestyles of the citizens. The superintendent was also a kind of judge of production disputes when he was made aware of internal disagreements by the general manager or any other employee of the Royal Factory. If he found fault, he would be responsible for punishing violators of the rules with fines or imprisonment, then also advising the sovereign on cases liable to expulsion from the colony. ⁴

The superintendent’s secretary also acted as a rationale, which in the Kingdom of Naples was a profession concerned with the control of public accounting and, in the case of San Leucio, the administration of accounts. His salary as of 1815 was 30 ducats, one-sixth of the superintendent’s pay, but far from low. ⁵ His function as secretary was, however, limited to the days when the superintendent was present in the colony. ⁶

In the accounting offices, in addition to the rationale, a scriptural and two rationale’s helpers were employed, in addition to the treasurer. ⁷ Their salaries ranged from 24 to 30 ducats. Adding up the salaries of the clerks shows that the colony’s annual expenses for accounting services amounted to 732 ducats, plus 480 ducats a year for the treasury. The treasurer was not entitled to aides financed by the colony, but, if he saw fit, on his own initiative he could hire outside professionals at his own expense and under his direct responsibility. He also paid salaries under a mandate from the rationale and with the signature of the general manager. The general manager acted as an intermediary between administration and production: during the period of silk processing, he would give the spinning mill manager a sheet with the different quantities to respond appropriately to the orders received. In addition, he supervised the silk drawn to sell on a weekly basis, ordered the wardrobe attendant to deliver the silk needed for production to the spinning mills’ director, and supervised the success of the yarn. He also had relations with the dyer, checking his skill in color tone composition, and with the artisans, being responsible for the proper operation of the machinery.

Among the lesser employees was the notary: with no private purchases or sales of land or housing in the colony, his activity was limited to the simple endorsement or annotation of official deeds (see Note 7). In addition to the accounting offices, which represented a true model for the time in business management in the Kingdom, another element of modernity present at San Leucio is evident from a careful study of the administrative activities of the Royal Factory. The factory was structured in a top–down manner according to duties, with the prefect of the factory and the director of the spinning mills at the head, who were responsible for the smooth running of production, ⁸ and the prefect of the apprentice weavers, with the task of training and supervising the younger workers. Among the three professions, the spinning mill director had more responsibilities; he had to be the top expert in reeling, oversee the good keeping of fullers and the selection of fullers.

The control of the two prefects and the director of the heaths also centered on the director of the spinning machines, who in turn mainly supervised the manufacturers, that is, the workers of the Royal Factory, also referred to in the documents as ‘artieri’ or ‘artists’. The spinning machine was a machine consisting of three parts, to channel the silk, to spin it to one end, and to twist it to the required ends. This process was submitted to the spinning machine director, who would take notes in the case of breakdowns and pass the information to the scribe before calling in the repair carpenter. He also taught the spinners how to distinguish good silk from bad, assigning them to the most experienced workers. The factory worker was of two types: provost or novice. The provosts were skilled workers, especially in the care of the yarn. A particularly skilled worker was called upon to hold the position of assortant or dyer. The assortator had to be very skilled in creating a perfect balance in the drapes. If not, he would first derive four threads from the silk: thin, middling, round, and coarse. The next stage of rebalancing was to harmonize the different thicknesses to make them as symmetrical as possible. The dyer, on the other hand, was a kind of hybrid worker, halfway between a laborer and an artist. He had a perfect knowledge of colors and techniques for dyeing silks, using a boiler and ‘drugs,’ or natural compounds that he requested in writing from the superintendent.

Beginners, on the other hand, carried out the orders of the general manager and sub-directors. They oversaw keeping the loom well square and the case in the direction of evenly beating the ‘subbio’. The manufacturers also cut unequal threads, beat the crate evenly to avoid bending, supervised the comb, and, if it malfunctioned, were duty-bound to call the ‘combmaker’. They would check the perfect draw of the selvedge. Beginners were accountable for damage caused to the machinery: each loom was evaluated by the rationale.

As can be seen from the obligations and responsibilities of the workers, in San Leucio the industrial machinery was taken care of down to the smallest detail, kept in order, and considered as the fulcrum of production; for this reason, any damage to the machine was a serious loss of work rhythms. Nevertheless, it must be remembered that, contrary to some analyses that wanted San Leucio to be a kind of socialist experiment, the workers were not absolutely masters of the means of production and there were no factory councils, and the state, which was the real owner, was not configured as an apex entity that was the result of the will of the workers united in a mass party to manage a revolutionary phase, but a kingdom understood absolutistically by a ruler actually far from progressivism, with exceptions to the rule represented, precisely, by the Leucian experiment.

Great importance was given to the weavers’ mistress, who judged and administered the production of the silk weavers. Her monthly salary was 12 ducats, which for a woman of the time was an extraordinary salary. There was also a tannery and warp mistress; the tannery was the machine that enabled the production of a larger amount of yarn work, because by means of tannering, which anticipated knitting on the machine, a more evenly and with greater mass on a single spool was carried out in tension skein arrangement. The tannery and warp master supervised the proper tannering of the silk, the work of the warpers, and supervised the weft tanners so that they would cut residual and unequal hairs, knots, and hairs from the weft. The warpers, assigned to the warping machine, were responsible for assembling the threads next to each other after untying them from the spools to form the so-called ‘warp,’ or yarn, of a cloth and then winding it onto the warp destined for the loom. In the Leucian industrial experience, until the 1830s the loom model used had two subbios, one at the back and one at the front, with different functions: the first led the warp, the second collected the worked fabric. The control of the invoice was carried out later by two fabric directors, who supervised the good performance of the product, so much so that they received a salary of 40 ducats. In addition, there was also a stocking director, of lesser importance than the fabric controllers. In the control function, there were also other duties held by women; for example, the spinning director supervised the tanners, whom he taught the correct evaluation of the garments to avoid malfunction of the spinning machines. He assigned a defined number of tanners, who passed the spools, and doubling machines to each manufactory. The tanners, guided by the master, would open the skein on the gaviglia to untangle those garments that had become tangled in the dyeing process.

Another prominent female professional figure was assigned to the care of silkworm breeding. The spinning mill manager, in fact, was supervised by the tractor women, who went to the ‘cuculliera’ daily for weighing, pinning everything down in the register kept by the fullers’ keepers. When the working day was over, the spinning mill manager would order each tractor to affix an identification tag with the day, name, and quality of the silk written on it. Finally, he would attend to the proper spinning of the silk, also taking count of the capimans, furs, cloth, and worms.

On the computational side, in the accountancy offices of the Royal Factory, accounting entries crossed theoretical boundaries, adapting practice to the needs of production and the site without referring to a single accounting method. It must also be remembered that the pragmatic adaptation of accounting records at the site was mainly due to two aspects: there was a farm and a factory in San Leucio, and the two productions integrated seamlessly, such that a system of collaboration was generated aimed at trading the finished product, silk. Thus, accounting was adapted to the rhythms of business reporting and land management, as the Leucian rationales also had the task of controlling the patrimonial trends resulting from the renting of the site’s land to external tenants, and because of the heterogeneous conformation of the colonial capital the accountants became skilled in various accounting techniques.

Throughout the Leucian accounting system, a special note deserves to be made of the figure of the master of warping and warping. As shown indirectly by the multitude of studies on the history of accountancy, the female sex has little presence in the field of accounting. The subject seemed totally the preserve of men, both in the technical and theoretical fields. However, this should come as no surprise, since, considering gender roles in the history of business up to the 20th century, women were strangers to the practice of trading independently. This does not rule out the possibility that wives, daughters, or otherwise of merchants, whether in small stores or large trading companies, may have helped manage finances and assets, thanks in part to their proximity to accounting professionals skilled in double-entry bookkeeping, inventorying, or otherwise. In the specific case of San Leucio, a woman, the master of the tanners, was entrusted with part of the colony’s complex accounting system. The sub-director in charge of the tannery delivered batches of silk to the ‘maestra’, who, in addition to supervising the subordinates, had to keep separate double-entry books with the give and take for each quantity of silk delivered to her, with related costs and inventory entries. Thus, the colonial experiment also gave a female professional figure a managerial task, a not insignificant element in national business history (Cringoli and Pomella, 2020).

In addition to the various occupations described above, most Leucian workers had not held computational jobs. In the two branches of production, Factory and Company, according to age and years of experience, there were two types of artisans, the skilled and the novice, covered by both women and men. The provets handled more difficult tasks and controlled the machinery, while the beginners had to keep the loom well squared, remove uneven threads, and beat the cloth, paying attention to the uniformity of their work. They were required to call the maintainer if parts of the loom malfunctioned, as the regulations paid close attention to the care of the machinery. Among artisans, the fabricator was the most common occupational figure in the Leucian colony; today it would be equivalent to a laborer with an average degree of specialization.

Gender equality in the Leucian labor context manifested itself in some tasks and, most importantly, in wages. Wages, in fact, depended on the improvement of one’s silk art and could reach the pay of the best Leucian or foreign masters, while most colonists averaged 12–14 carlins a day, both men and women. Merit was favored, spurring workers to improve their art with the possibility of attaining prestigious rewards, such as gold medals or awards of various kinds (Cringoli and Pomella, 2023: 38–39). From a quantitative point of view, in the 1830s and 1840s, on average about 90 women were employed in the Real Fabbrica in the various tasks described; the same number pertained to the number of those employed in the Real Azienda Agricola: ⁹ a remarkable number considering that, at the Unification of Italy, San Leucio was inhabited by 1000 colonists. This shows that women of working age (16–50) were an integral part of the colonial system.

Gender equality in human capital formation and welfare

San Leucio was a typical phenomenon of the labor-intensive proto industry (Austin and Sugihara, 2013), or rather household economy (De Vries, 2008), in constant connection with the rural Mezzogiorno, both in terms of the type of farm and the integration of agricultural practices and household economy. This type of state-led social experiment was the basis for the creation of human social capital. Putnam defines human social capital as ‘trust, rules that manage coexistence, networks of civic associations, elements that improve the efficiency of social organization by promoting concerted initiatives’ (Putnam, 1992). San Leucio, in practice, fully meets Putnam’s description of human social capital. San Leucio was a community based on the creation of rules of coexistence, reciprocity, values, and social organization to strengthen cooperation among local families. Everything was aimed at achieving common welfare, at winning the spirit of sharing and collaboration that Putnam speaks of as the starting point for the creation of an optimal organization of society. At the same time, from the productive point of view, the focus of the Leucian experiment was industriousness, with the aim of stimulating the formation of human capital, including through community literacy programs. Indeed, the basis of human capital formation in the colony was an innovative school system and a proactive apprenticeship model.

To avoid unemployment after the end of school age, a real integration between school and work was planned: ‘to prevent their training from being lost once their studies were over, he introduced a manufacture of raw silks, adjusting the choice to the vocation that the local inhabitants were manifesting independently’ (Ferdinand, 1789: X). The educational school for workers’ children represented the first compulsory school in Italy and, more importantly, open to both sexes. Education was provided from age 6 to 15 years, that is, until eligibility for work, and the teachings included hours of religion, mathematics, geography, and reading of sacred texts. The only gender difference in schooling concerned one subject: males were taught gymnastics, females home economics. Fifteen-year-olds of both sexes, having finished their schooling, were expected to follow their masters into apprenticeship, climbing the ladder in stages according to their demonstrated ability over time. Apprenticeship was regulated by the Code. In Ferdinand’s desire, the Royal Factory was to be a place of both production and learning for young people.

So, apprenticeship began from age 15 for both sexes and was paid 2 carlins a day. This guaranteed direct entry into the world of work, and as time went on, wages varied according to the degree to which one’s silk art was perfected, which was evaluated annually by the masters of the arts. In addition, support for productivity was maintained through rewards that represented a kind of public praise for setting an example; there were gold medals for the most virtuous, or the opportunity to sit in the ‘Merit Bench’ in Church during Sunday liturgical celebrations, which represented the highest recognition for Leucian citizens.

The importance of the direct link between school and work is repeatedly stressed in the Code, especially as a means of avoiding social tensions due to unemployment or material shortages. Despite this end, indirectly the school-to-work link was the mainstay of Leucian human capital formation. The worker was trained as early as school age, and continuation through apprenticeship was functional in learning the first secrets of using the textile machinery that the ruler had brought in from abroad to increase the Royal Factory’s degree of productivity. In addition to vocational training, compulsory schooling created a unique environment within the Leucian borders: all colonists were literate, hence the possibility for anyone, men and women, to be able to keep an account book, to be able to read the orders of the wardens and merchants at the port. In such a context, literacy was functional not only for the cultural elevation of the colony, but also for work. The regulations of the Royal Factory and the Royal Agricultural Company of San Leucio describe dozens of workers of both sexes who, among their duties, had higher responsibilities for supervision and control of the production process, at the compartmental and general level, and this was made possible only by the very high degree of literacy of the local population, which was unparalleled throughout the Italian peninsula at the time.

The same gender equality was also achieved in welfare. The Leucian welfare system was highly progressive and achieved such coverage that it was equaled only between the 19th and 20th centuries in nations that manifested the same inclinations with a view to safeguarding social peace in times of full industrialization:

Welfare is not just an intention at San Leucio, it is a ‘de vivis’ experiment in which the factory is the center of shaping family structure, the role of women, the education of children, the moralization of customs. But the time of experimentation is short because it goes through important managerial transformations, transitions of intendancies, abrupt swings between private and public experiences. (Currà, 2023)

The San Leucio Code formally abolished private dowries and, thus, effectively eliminated a prejudicial burden on the shoulders of women who wished to enter marriage free of customary economic constraints. In lieu of private dowries, during the 19th century women factory workers were granted funds that were disbursed when they presented an official marriage certificate. Examples of liquidated dowries appear in the records of 1832–1833, when dowry applications were made by some female workers of the Royal Factory, who were granted 15 to 30 carlins. ¹⁰ The Code also provided for a reward for successful marriage, which the sovereign called ‘beneficence’, granted to deserving spouses in the keeping of the home and work (Ferdinand, 1789: XXX). Continuing in the same vein, Paragraph VII of the Code took care of an additional matter that could create dissension within the community and established a principle of equality of the sexes, namely, the laws of succession. Ferdinand abolished the testamentary power, establishing an agreement of natural succession from father to son, or, in the absence of direct descent, first-degree relatives must be considered. In the absence of first-degree relatives, the wife succeeded only to the usufruct of the property until widowhood was maintained, since, upon the widow’s death, in the event of the absence of heirs the property went to the Monte degli Orfani, which had an Orphan’s Fund to manage the finances and give the less fortunate a chance. ¹¹ Orphans, in addition to various benefits, were also entitled to one-sixth of their fathers’ compensation; in addition, the Royal administration provided for exceptional cases in which assistance was more conspicuous. ¹² For widows, during the first decades of the 19th century, however, the possibility of obtaining “a pension of justice” was also granted, especially in cases where household income was insufficient to maintain a decent standard of living. ¹³ By law it was decided that children of both sexes were to enjoy equally the succession of their fathers, a real break with the past, when the family line of descent contemplated only the male branch. Widows were also assured half of the wages of the workers who took their husbands’ place in the event that they had their still non-working-age children. At the time the children began apprenticeships, which allowed for a wage of at least 2 carlins a day, widows were entitled to one-third of the wage, not to the extinction of the obligation with the death of the widow herself.

Other monthly subsidies were provided for widows of Royal Farm employees, or for occupational diseases developed in the factory. ¹⁴

As can be easily deduced, this system of protection for women, both socially and professionally, was also indirectly aimed at protecting the family context of women, the hard-working family, which was at the heart of the Leucian supply chain. The family was the essential cell of the Leucian society, as amply indicated in Ferdinand’s own Code. Indeed, in the sovereign’s Code, several chapters are devoted to the care of marriages and family formation. According to Ferdinand (1789), ‘from the multiplication of marriages originated, and yet flourish societies, and Empires’ (p.XXV). The King stipulated that the minimum age for marriage was 20 for men and 16 for women, and that before obtaining official authorization prospective spouses had to have a certificate of merit from the director and the director of trades, the latter one of the most relevant female professional figures, as it was linked to managerial tasks that attested to the degree of specialization attainable for both sexes thanks to the advanced system of human capital training. In Ferdinand’s idea, marriage in the colony was supported by both feelings and labor. For this reason, boys were not issued a marriage permit until they had demonstrated that they were skilled laborers and could provide for the sustenance of the nascent family.

To facilitate marriage within the colony, the sovereign established limitations on privileges in case a Leucian, either a man or a woman, contracted marriage with a subject outside the community. In fact, there were different treatments for different cases concerning men and women: if a woman wanted to marry outside the colony, the royal administration granted her a sum of 50 ducats, but she lost the privileges of the Leucians and could no longer hope to regain them (Ferdinand, 1789: XXIX). Despite the manifest desire to create substantial equality between men and women in the company town, San Leucio remained bound at least ‘on paper’ to a patriarchal view of the family, in which the ‘head of this conjugal society is the man’ (Ferdinand, 1789: XXXI); it can be called, however, a partial patriarchy, since, according to the articles of law, the man was forbidden to oppress the woman in all its forms: ‘[. . .] the husband owes his wife protection, vigilance, provision, alimony, and the most painful labors of life’ (Ferdinand, 1789: XXXI). Domestic discord had to be avoided so as not to adversely affect the character of the offspring and to make the home environment as suitable as possible for productivity.

All the features just described of the Leucian household environment supported a conspicuous increase in household production, which in practice at certain periods in the colony’s history surpassed the city’s own industry in consistency and sales capacity. Silk work was favored within the living cells with the presence of a small spinning wheel in the main room, so that the family could carry on the traditional domestic employment of parental labor. In addition, women, educated by the colony’s public school, as opposed to men, had learned the rudiments of home economics, which was not exclusively concerned with keeping and cleaning the house. In fact, if the men were in most cases engaged in the town’s factory and the Royal Company, the women conducted a parallel work equally profitable from the economic point of view; once the factory shift was over, the man also devoted himself to the small private seteria, elevating the degree of industriousness of the family. This tendency toward domestic industriousness is also certified in the records, but in a negative way, as an attempt was made to limit the competition that Leucian families might have conducted against the products of city industry. ¹⁵

Conclusion

The company town of San Leucio emerges from the present research as a particularly innovative and significant example of socioeconomic experimentation, developed through the impulse of Enlightenment ideas in the 18th century. Through an in-depth and original qualitative study of local archival sources, the research has uncovered previously unpublished and little-explored aspects related to gender equality, demonstrating that the San Leucio Code was not limited to formal principles, but introduced substantive and concrete equality both in the labor context and in the formation of human capital and social dynamics within the community.

The case of San Leucio constitutes a unicum in late 18th-century European economic and social history, representing an attempt by an absolute state to build a productive community based on principles of formal and substantive equality, particularly on the level of gender equality. The organization of work, educational and family legislation, and the wage and welfare system outline a proto-industrial model in which women not only participate fully in the production cycle, but also hold roles of technical, educational, and administrative responsibility, benefiting from a legal status unprecedented in the context of the time.

Among the most innovative elements was the enhancement of female professionals who operated in managerial and technical positions, such as the master of the incannatrici, who was even entrusted with the responsibility of double-entry bookkeeping. In addition, the analysis showed how the wage equality enshrined in the Leucian Code was applied in daily practices, making San Leucio an extraordinary exception to the coeval European context, which was characterized by profound gender inequalities.

The centrality of the hard-working family, the organic connection between school and factory, equal access to apprenticeships and trades, and a welfare system attentive to the life cycle and social vulnerability – such as in the case of widows and orphans – configure San Leucio as an advanced laboratory of modernization, in which women’s emancipation finds recognition within a communal vision of welfare and progress.

Although marked by obvious limitations, starting with the failure to extend the model to the rest of the Kingdom and the persistence of a patriarchal structure on paper in family relations, the San Leucio experiment shows that already at the end of the 18th century it was possible to think of – and partly implement – an organization of labor based on principles of equity, merit, and social cohesion. At a time when European industrialization was emerging along quite different tracks, marked by profound class and gender inequalities, the Leucian project represents a challenge to the dominant narrative on the relationship between industrial development and female subordination, as an alternative model of development to what was emerging in the rest of Europe, namely, a system based on accumulation.

The study of San Leucio thus invites a critical rethinking of the historical genealogy of gender equality in the labor, suggesting that it is not only the product of 20th-century struggles, but also the fruit, albeit a minority one, of early and original experiments that deserve more attention in the historiography on industry, welfare, and gender relations. So, San Leucio is identified not only as an Enlightenment experiment of local scope, but as an emblematic case that allows us to reread, through a new perspective, the dynamics of economic and social inclusion in modern European history. The Leucian experiment offers a valuable interpretive lens to better understand the complexity and ambiguities of historical processes of modernization, representing a solid historiographical basis for critically reflecting on contemporary challenges related to gender, labor, and social justice.