Abstract
Just as medical researchers often extrapolate results from testing performed on male patients to patients of all genders, so too do the authors in this volume show how research on the early modern European economy writ large extrapolated and made assumptions based almost entirely on research into men's work. This volume promises, and delivers, an analysis of the economy that fully incorporates women's work into an existing narrative about labor that privileges men's work. It challenges assumptions about women's roles based on faulty research assumptions, outdated stereotypes, and exclusion of women from research on certain questions. The introduction and essays in this volume tackle those exclusions and stereotypes to produce a work that provides an approach to fully integrating women into the historiography of work. The text also addresses key segments of the early modern economy and how our understanding of them changes, often dramatically, when women's contributions are considered on equal terms with those of men.
In the introduction, Margaret R. Hunt and Alexandra Shepard explain how their approach is not one that simply explores women's work in the past. Rather, they explain that taking women's contributions as equally important to our perception of the economy does not simply add more information, but rather fundamentally shifts how we understand it. As the editors spell out: “[w]omen were active agents in the early modern economy, rather than only passively affected by changes wrought by men” (p. 1). Hunt and Shepard address several historiographical positions regarding women that the volume challenges. First, they confront the idea that women's work consistently took place in domestic space, as well as the corollary that their work was unpaid. Related to that premise, the editors push back on the assertion that women's working lives were immutable, in part because they were biologically determined. One source for this bogus claim is a widely cited study asserting that “British women in the early modern period did 30 per cent of the paid work while men did 70 per cent. This is accompanied by the claim that the proportion has not appreciably changed in 600 years” (p. 20). The assumption about the timeless quality of women's experiences in the past may be the most shocking, but it is by no means the only one that this volume takes up and then tears down in its quest to show that women's labor was equally as important to the functioning and development of the early modern economy as men's labor.
The essays masterfully demonstrate the argument laid out by the editors. Each one takes on both a specific sector of the economy and the existing misconceptions about their gendered aspects. The chapters are arranged so that readers begin in the space seen as the center of women's work experiences—the household—and move through enlarging circles to (potentially) the most distant space of war. From the household, readers move through care work, agriculture, rural manufactures, urban markets, migration, and war. While the spatial and geographic elements of this work varied for women in different situations (e.g., people living in a war zone would find it occupied a most intimate part of their lives), overall, the space of activity grows from chapter to chapter. Further, the assumptions about women's lives shift in kind and number as historians shift from examining the household, associated most closely with female labor, to war which historians have seen as almost exclusively a domain of male action.
Maria Ågren begins by tackling women's work in the household. Here she aims to demonstrate that women's work was not inexorably attached to the home, and that men performed more domestic labor than historians have acknowledged. Part of her reassessment involves not simply looking at the work men and women did, but also the nature of the household itself. Ågren points out that far from being a private, enclosed space of consumption and domestic activity, the household was a productive space transacting with outsiders. This was not simply the case for artisans who often incorporated workshops into their homes, but for virtually all early modern families. Further, Ågren shows how historians have seen men's work as more important by seeing them as practicing a single occupation in contrast to the multiple economic tasks women took on to support themselves and their families. However, research reveals that men too engaged in pluriactivity, and generally did not have a single occupational identity. Related to the finding that men's working lives showed more similarity to women's than historians have acknowledged, Alexandra Shepard forcefully demonstrates the extent to which men engaged in that most female encoded labor, care work. Shepard's approach confronts current perceptions of care work alongside her rigorous analysis of this labor in the past. She calls for a reassessment of the shape of the care work sector in two ways. First, she draws our attention to the indispensable need for care, much of which goes and went unpaid. As many other feminist scholars have argued, economic activity requires someone to tend to the elderly, young, and vulnerable. Just as in the present, Shepard shows that this labor was also necessary for the functioning and development of the early modern economy. However, Shepard goes further in questioning assumptions about care by demonstrating the significant extent to which men also engaged in care work. The pluriactivity that Ågren describes as foundational to the financial stability of early modern households carries over to the care work that needed to be done there as well.
Moving outside of the domicile, several chapters explore the ways that men and women worked in spaces that were often close to home. As Jane Whittle and Hilde Sandvik assert, agriculture dominated the early modern economy and, in historians’ treatment, is seen as an unchanging and male dominated sphere of employment. Whittle and Sandvik convincingly demonstrate the ways that scholars have made assumptions about farm work, often based on ethnographic observation, without fully exploiting the range of sources nor questioning prevalent gender stereotypes. The chapter tackles the perception that farm work looked the same across centuries and geographies, with strict gender lines upheld in terms of what tasks men and women could undertake. Whittle and Sandvik reveal the underused sources that show women engaging in many agricultural tasks, and not simply the husbandry and gleaning traditionally seen as female work. Neither the agricultural practices nor the gender roles looked the same across countries in this era. To demonstrate the range of women's contributions to agricultural productivity, the authors take up two case studies, using fine grained detail to reveal the specific regional aspects of farm work. Agricultural production in Norway was made up of multiple strands including raising livestock, commercial fishing, and subsistence agriculture. The place of commercial fishing here meant that women spent significant periods of time apart from their husbands and responsible for all tasks centered on the farm. In south west England, where dairying and large-scale agriculture were more prevalent, women engaged in many different tasks, but there was greater gendered division of labor. As well, men did not engage in regular migration, leaving women to maintain farms themselves.
Production of consumer goods, in both rural and urban settings, made up a growing segment of the early modern economy. Considered a consequence of the heightened demand for consumer goods, women's participation in proto-industry and production was seen as a consequence of their desire to purchase more goods for themselves. However, both Carmen Sarasùa and Anna Bellavitis question this premise of the “Industrious Revolution.” In rural areas, Sarasùa demonstrates that “women's manufacturing work was particularly export-oriented, precisely because it was cheaper” (p. 133). Rural women engaged in textile production were not working to bolster the local consumer economy. They were key cogs in the expanding colonial and overseas trading system that was fueling Europe's prosperity. The more accessible wages for women workers also meant that rather than the home-based production emphasized in much of the literature on rural manufacturing, more women were able to live on their own. In the urban production system, Bellavitis perceives some of the same patterns that Sarasùa sees in the countryside. Women worked in a wide range of occupations, and not simply in a single sector of the economy. Bellavitis pays particular attention to guilds which dominated skilled trades in many European cities. She brings attention to the disconnect between the need for female labor in guilds despite the fact that they almost categorically excluded women from their ranks. As with other economic sectors, the discourse about women's roles hid their extensive and indispensable contributions.
The final chapters of this volume explore migration and war. The dominant understanding of migration sees long distance migration as something men did and short distance migration and chain migration as women's practice. Amy Louise Erickson and Ariadne Schmidt question these assumptions, calling attention to the large number of women who left their homes alone to take up work in cities. They also show that, in fact, most women who migrated did not enter domestic service. They estimate that most women who left to work in cities took up other employment: manufacturing, service industry positions, textile production, and the like. Their assertions are backed up with a great deal of data gleaned from sources that other historians have not mined, or have not mined with questions about female migration, such as marriage registers. Further, in terms of the motivations to move, Erickson and Schmidt smartly turn around the assumption that women's movement responded to men's prior decisions: “men also made decisions to migrate within the context of family strategies” (p. 169). Women's decisions turned on economic opportunity, and not simply as a response to their male family members.
Margaret R. Hunt, in her chapter on War, reveals most starkly the ways that lack of attention to sources and questions centering male experience leave aside women. Hunt explains that the historiography of military history, which takes a technical focus on military technology, on the one hand, or the development of the fiscal state on the other, excludes women almost categorically. Dismissed as either support staff performing domestic service, such as cooking or laundry, or as camp followers serving soldiers’ sexual needs, the role of women in military provisioning, in supporting the home front, and in paying the taxes needed to build an army are neglected. Hunt does not have a body of scholarship to pull together as the other chapter contributors can do. Instead, Hunt points out the questions that should be asked about women and the economy of war, and the neglect of examining how the “resource destruction, demographic manipulations, systematic coercion and ideological manoeuvers…affected the working behavior of many more people than just young men” (p. 219). Hunt points to a vast set of historical questions waiting to be explored.
All of the essays in this volume address the question of what our understanding of the economy looks like if we treat the contributions of women as equally important to those of men. They show how reading sources with such questions in mind reveals unexplored aspects of the past. The volume's geographical reach, with essays exploring Europe from Ireland to Turkey to Russia, strengthens the argument that the economic history of all of Europe needs to fully integrate gender. Several essays do make reference to the growing place of colonial trade in Europe's economic development, but this key element of the era is left for future researchers to explore. The methodological creativity showcased here provides inspiration and guidance for future historians of gender. These essays point the way toward a more inclusive, more accurate, and more nuanced telling of Europe's economic past.