Women's Work and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Brittany

Nancy Locklin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754658191
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134781225
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Based on a solid foundation of archival research that ranges from tax rolls to notarial records, this study adds an important chapter to our understanding of women in pre-industrial Europe. Through a rigorous examination of primary documents peculiar to eighteenth-century Brittany, the author demonstrates the difficulties engendered in broad generalities about European women, and makes a strong case for the necessity for historians to account for regional differences in women's experiences. In particular, Nancy Locklin makes a compelling argument for the need to incorporate a broader basis upon which women attained their identity. Indeed, Locklin rightly contends that most women in pre-industrial European societies were recognized (and perhaps saw themselves) through a variety of identities over the course of their lives, depending on their age, familial connections, marital status, and the type of work they performed, and that often these identities overlapped. Locklin also shows the extent to which legal and ideological prescriptions painted a relatively negative picture of women's status, but that a close examination of women's participation in family, community, and commercial affairs reveals a much more complex and divergent reality.

Chapter 1

The Women of Brittany

Before we can delve too deeply into the issues, we need a clear picture of our subject. Often, when we speak of women in the past, we have to rely upon random and fragmentary evidence. In this chapter, I will try to outline the quantitative data available so that we can have some idea of the significance of the sample. I have placed the demographic data, gleaned primarily from tax rolls, in the context of marital status and household arrangements. These categories—daughter, wife, widow, “spinster”—are the ones most often used to describe women, and are an easy place to begin.

Who are these women? What were their living arrangements? How were they identified and counted? What proportion of a given population was made up of single women? Of widows? Only when we have a grasp of the situation can we address the more interesting questions: Who decided how they would be identified, and how did they see themselves? Was their identity grounded in themselves as women—as mothers, daughters, and wives, or as merchants and workers? Or are all these identities too intricately wound to separate? How much of this identity was imposed by others, and how much by the historian?

Demography and the sources

Statistical data is never without complication, and so a few words about my sources and methodology are in order. Demographic studies of the seventeenth century are almost purely based upon parish registers, which record baptisms, marriages, and burials. These sources can only provide enough information to make estimates about the population because they are inconsistent and often incomplete.¹ Furthermore, parish registers do not reflect the numbers of mobile or celibate people. Naturally, widows and unmarried women are invisible in parish registers until they marry or die, and so it is nearly impossible to reconstruct the independent female population based upon parish registers.

Tax rolls are more reliable but introduce their own set of problems. In the seventeenth century, the primary tax in Brittany, and most of France, was the fouage, a hearth tax instituted in the fourteenth century. Brittany was exempt from the taille, but paid the fouage from its inception to the end of the old regime.² But the fouage rolls are of limited use. As the fouage was a hearth tax, the rolls only show the number of households in a town, not individuals, and they include no occupational information. Because clergy, nobles, and the inhabitants of “grandes villes” were exempt from paying the tax, the fouage rolls offer no information about city dwellers. Furthermore, the definition of “hearth” varied from region to region, and the debates over claimed exemptions were constant, making the rolls inconsistent. And lastly, there is a problem of availability because relatively few of the fouage rolls have survived and are scattered in the archives; some are with notarial papers, some in family collections, and others with intendant’s archives. I have included some data from the fouage tax rolls only for comparison of general household information and because there are few other choices of sources for the seventeenth century.

Thus, the primary sources of quantitative data for this study are capitation tax rolls, dating from approximately 1710 up to the end of the ancien régime in 1789. The capitation was a direct and universal head tax instituted in 1695 and collected every year; it was the first tax from which no one, except the clergy, was exempt.³ Therefore, the capitation rolls allow us to see the composition of households in a variety of settings. This means we can get an accurate picture of both independent and married women in cities, towns, and villages during the eighteenth century.

An elaborate system of 22 classifications was created for the implementation of the capitation. The nobility were separated from officers and commoners, and paid the tax according to their station and landholdings. Some guilds paid a lump sum on behalf of their members and divided the burden internally. Each taxpayer paid according to status and wealth. A successful wholesale merchant, for example, was expected to pay at least 100 livres; town-dwelling rentiers paid an average of 40–60 livres. Artisans who owned their own shop paid around 10 livres, and soldiers, servants, and day laborers paid one livre.⁴

Typical tax roll entries include the name of each head of household, that person’s occupation, and the tax levied on each household based on the total income and the number of people living there. The rolls are excellent sources for establishing family and work patterns, and how these patterns change over time. Unfortunately, there are certain inherent limitations in the tax rolls as source material. The first problem, naturally, is one of availability. Though the tax was instituted in 1695, it is rare to find an intact roll book from before 1710. Furthermore, it was impossible to find exactly the same set of rolls for each of the towns in my sample. Thus, my rolls from Morlaix begin in 1709 and those from Saint-Malo begin in 1720. The latest archived old regime tax roll for the majority of my chosen cities dated from 1753, while I have books from Rennes and Nantes finishing in 1777 and 1789, respectively. I have collected similar sets from each town, but the years do not necessarily correspond from one place to another.

Another problem typical of all demographic sources is the uneven recording of information. As noted above, the typical entry had a name, and occupation, and the tax paid. Many logbooks, especially those from the beginning of the eighteenth century, list only a name and the tax paid, providing no occupational information at all. Some list the occupational information for every male head of household, and none for any female head of household. Some provide the names and occupations of every working adult in the home, including the names and occupations of spouses whose work differs from that of the primary entrant. For some years in certain cities, it is impossible to follow work patterns, while other record books provide rich detail about each member of a family.

The inconsistent recording of women’s names makes a study of women’s work especially difficult. It was not unusual for a married woman or widow to be listed under her own name if she was the head of her household. At times, a woman’s name is provided even if her husband is considered the head of the household. Unfortunately, most entries listing married couples consist of the man’s name and occupation followed by the phrase, “sa femme” [his wife], and his wife’s occupation. Thus, there is no way of being sure if this year’s widow was last year’s unnamed “femme.” In addition, a widow may be identified in one tax roll by her own name, with or without an indication of her status as a widow, and called simply “the widow X” in the next. If she subsequently remarried and returned to her former identity as “femme,” then her trail was lost. The difficulty for the researcher is compounded in cases where the town clerk, in the midst of recording hundreds or thousands of names, reverted to shorthand as people familiar to him paid their taxes. Several people in each roll were identified only by a first name, and sometimes only by a nickname.

It is interesting to note the occasional examples of married women identified by name with only a passing reference to their husbands: for example, “Marie X, fileuse, son mari un soldat” [Marie X, spinner, her husband a soldier]. At times, a woman is identified first and her husband is named, but the only profession identified for the home is a feminine one. Alone or as part of a couple, a man would never have been referred to as a “marchande,” “tailleuse,” or “galletiere,” the feminine forms of merchant, tailor, and cake-maker. This suggests that some women were the breadwinners. On occasion, such an entry will offer further explanation: “son mari invalid” [her husband is an invalid], or “son mari absent” [her husband is absent]. As often as not, however, the husbands’ unemployment is left unremarked in these cases.

Most occupations in this time period are easily categorized, and I have tried to distinguish between them in order to discuss differences in status and income. A tailleuse, a couturiere, and a marchande de mode all performed the basic service of making, altering, and selling women’s clothing.⁵ A lingere made, embellished, and sold items like underclothes and household linens, but also performed the basic services of a seamstress. Such occupations are easily identified as comparable clothing trades, and can be considered separate from the lower-paid positions held by spinners and yarn-bleachers. However, the task of distinguishing between women’s occupations is not without its problems. The term blanchisseuse could equally apply to a textile bleacher or a laundress, and so it was not always possible to gauge the impact of the local textile industry on the employment of women.

Generally speaking, certain occupations were a mark of poverty. The work of a fileuse [spinner] or blanchisseuse [bleacher] was often poorly paid and offered little hope of stability or upward mobility. It was possible, for example, for a tailleuse to move up a tax bracket, join the corporation (assuming female membership was permitted), and avail herself of guild protection. A spinner or a day laborer, by contrast, was likely to remain poor, living hand to mouth for her entire life.

Women who worked in hidden or illicit trades are, out of necessity, largely absent from the statistical portions of this study. Servants are virtually invisible in tax records because they were paid for by their employers and never identified by name. In addition, many servants in urban areas were recent arrivals from the countryside, and they frequently changed employers. Thus, they are even harder to keep track of than married women. Prostitutes, for obvious reasons, did not identify themselves as such for tax purposes. And finally, nuns, like all members of the clergy, were exempt from the fouage and the capitation, and they were noted only if they had to pay taxes for servants. Women in these three categories—servants, prostitutes, and nuns—were certainly integral parts of the early modern landscape, in a variety of social and economic ways. But, out of necessity, my sources concerning these women are largely anecdotal.

Cities, ports, and towns

The region of Brittany offers a range of populations for study, from tiny villages to huge naval ports and commercial urban centers (see Map 1.1). I have been able to estimate the percentage of female-headed households, and specifically widow-headed households, in all possible settings. From this data, I have been able to extrapolate the percentage of single women.⁶ Thus, we can compare the circumstances of women living in a variety of locations (see Table 1.1).

Rennes and Nantes were already large cities by the mid-seventeenth century. Rennes was the administrative center of Brittany and had the region’s largest population in 1660, around 30,000 people. The population of Rennes reached a height of 50,000 in the early decades of the eighteenth century, but declined steadily and by the eve of the Revolution had leveled off at 42,000.⁷ Nantes was a thriving commercial center above all else, serving as a conduit for Brittany and the Loire valley to the Atlantic Ocean. Nantes was smaller than Rennes in the seventeenth century, hovering around 21,000 in 1696, but had grown to 30,000 in 1710 and supported over 80,000 people in 1789.⁸ Urban centers by their nature attract a large number of unattached people, and one might expect to find numerous independent women where the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Women of Brittany
• 2 Work and Identity
• 3 Women under Breton Law
• 4 Social Life and Honor
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index