Women and Business since 1500

Invisible Presences in Europe and North America?

Béatrice Craig

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781350307445
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

This volume surveys the role women have played in various types of business as owners, co-owners and decision-making managers in European and North American societies since the sixteenth century. Drawing on up-to-date scholarship, it identifies the economic, social, legal and cultural factors that have facilitated or restricted women's participation in business. It pays particular attention to the ways in which gender norms, and their evolution, shaped not only those women's experience of business, but the ways they were perceived by contemporaries, documented in sources and, partly as a consequence, viewed by historians.

Part 1

The Early Modern World, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries

1

Context

To understand women’s business activities in this period, we need to understand not only the economic and political context in which such activities occurred, but also how early modern societies viewed women and defined their role. The ebbs and flows of the economy, technological changes, shifts in supply and demand for consumer products, the reorientation of trade routes and the emergence of new manufacturing regions provide the backdrop for our story. But in addition, we must be aware of the fact that early modern Europeans had a dramatically different understanding of economic activities from us: these were perceived as social activities subject to moral rules. Therefore, what were deemed legitimate economic activities for women was in large part determined by ideas about their nature and proper social roles.

I. The early modern economy

A. Three centuries of changes

The early modern world was a pre-industrial world; mechanized production and manufacturing did not appear until the very end of the period. But it was not static. Economic growth phases alternated with deceleration and stagnation, triggered by demographic, climatic and political factors. Sustained growth characterized the 1450–1550/70 period. At the turn of the sixteenth century, the European economy was buoyant, and had recovered from the plagues and wars of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The population rebounded – there were about 65 million people in Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and 83 million a hundred years later. Less than 10% of this population lived in towns or cities; however, this varied greatly from region to region: one in five in Spain and Italy; almost one in three in the Low Countries (what is now Belgium and the Netherlands), but only one out of 20 in England. Towns were still small. The largest European city, Paris, had about 225,000 inhabitants in 1500; only three other cities (all Italian) could boast more than 100,000 residents. London had about 50,000, Edinburgh 18,000 and no other British town had more than 10,000 inhabitants.

The lessening frequency of warfare made long-distance trade safer, and goods began to circulate again. For instance, English and Spanish wool was used by Flemish and Italian weavers to make very high-quality cloth, which was exported through Europe. Rising demand encouraged merchants to seek ways to bypass traditional urban crafts production in order to lower production costs, increase production output and respond more rapidly to shifts in consumer tastes. They began to outsource production to dispersed rural workers, gathered the finished products in their warehouses and sold them on national and even international markets, a process known as proto-industrialization, which became significant in the eighteenth century.

Western Europeans’ discovery of the Americas in the late fifteenth century and their developing maritime routes to the Orient brought new commodities or greater volumes of old commodities to Europe (tobacco, coffee, chocolate, tea, spices, porcelain, silk, cotton and dyestuff). Europeans, sometimes encouraged by their governments, tried to produce domestic substitutes for some of those expensive imports. The arrival of the new goods triggered a “consumer revolution” in the seventeenth century, and perhaps even earlier: more people were purchasing a greater number and a greater variety of goods; they were less concerned with durability than previously and more interested in novelty and even fashion. This led to quicker good replacements, and higher demand for cheaper ones. Settlers in American colonies also provided a growing market for metropolitan manufacturers.

Not all was well though. Population pressure, epidemics, climate changes, high inflation rates and warfare led to an economic slowdown after the middle of the sixteenth century, to state bankruptcies in Spain and France, and finally to stagnation in the seventeenth century. Bad harvests triggered cycles of famine, epidemics and death. Repeated conflicts caused devastation, high taxes and heavy government borrowing from the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618 to the end of the War of Spanish Succession in 1714. The European population dropped from about 83 million in 1600 to 77 million in 1650 (Germany lost about a quarter of its population during the Thirty Years War), before regaining lost ground.

The eighteenth century, by contrast, was characterized by sustained but unequally distributed economic growth and diversification, and the latter part of the century by a number of “revolutions” which were not all political: a “demographic revolution” ushering population increases, an “agricultural revolution” (increased productivity allowed farmers to feed a greater number of non-farmers in England, the Low Countries and northern France), an accelerated “consumer revolution” and an “industrious revolution”. The latter occurred when women and children shifted their efforts from production for the household to production for the market and households used this income to consume more market goods; this increased demand, encouraged trade and economic growth, and according to historian Jan de Vries would have spurred the better known “industrial revolution” that followed: new technologies were developed to satisfy this ever-growing demand. The impact of these various “revolutions” was, however, unevenly felt through Europe. North-western states and their colonies were the main beneficiaries. Despite a resumption of warfare in the second half of the century, European population rose from about 90 million around 1700 to about 129 million people around 1800, in addition to the 16 million who were by then settled in North America. But even this late, no more than one third of the population lived in cities, and only 20 European cities had more than 100,000 inhabitants. London was then the largest (almost a million) followed by Paris with half that number. Through this period, business activities were concentrated in urban areas, and the growth of towns was simultaneously a cause and consequence of the growth of business.

B. The moral economy of the early modern age

1. A world without profit?

The early modern world did not understand economic activities or profit the way we do. “Economics” comes from the ancient Greek word oikonomia that means “management of a household”, and it still had that meaning at the beginning of our period. Its scope and meaning was gradually enlarged to encompass the economic activities of a state viewed as a large household (“political economy”). This is why the French king Francis I granted a silk-producing monopoly to two merchants who would reduce the country’s dependence on imports in 1536. Spanish writer Pedro Fernandez Navarrete made the parallel explicit when he wrote in 1626, “kingdoms are nothing but a large extended family” (Vicente, 1996, p. 24). The king, naturally, was the father of this family. At the time, the economy was not viewed as an autonomous system governed by impersonal, reified forces like “the market” as twentieth-century economists describe it, but as an aggregate of discrete activities deeply embedded in a social and moral system. Thus, economic activities had to be subordinated to social and moral norms. Competition and the search for profit, fundamental to twenty-first-century business, were viewed with suspicion, when not roundly denounced as immoral manifestations of the cardinal sins of greed and avarice. One should satisfy oneself with earning an income suitable to one’s station in life. Society was a God-ordained hierarchy, where everyone had a place determined by one’s condition at birth, and economic competition and the search for increased profit potentially undermined it. Early modern thinkers also believed demand was inelastic: once people had earned enough money to buy their customary basket of goods, they would stop working. Working-class poverty was consequently deemed a necessity as everyone “knew” that only hunger could motivate common people to work.

States on the other hand could and did compete, militarily and economically. A group of economic thinkers known as mercantilists emerged in the seventeenth century who argued that the wealth and power of a state depended on its ability to generate a favourable trade balance – that is, exporting more than it imported. This justified heavy state intervention in the economy to boost exports and curtail (or prohibit) imports. Domestic consumption, which reduced the amount of goods available for exports and encouraged the import of foreign luxuries, was deemed to deplete state coffers and impoverish the state, and thus had to be kept within bounds.

2. But with regulations

Consequently local, regional and national authorities constantly subjected economic activities in general, and business ones in particular, to controls and regulations, and those regulations were considered not only desirable, but necessary: one therefore could not go into business as one wanted.

a. Municipal governments: At the very least, urban economic activities were subjected to the scrutiny of town and city councils. Urban authorities were concerned first with public hygiene, food purity and cost of living. But they could also limit the profit a craftsperson or shopkeeper could make – or simply cap prices on necessities to keep them accessible to all.

Sometimes, municipal authorities were also preoccupied with who engaged in trade and manufacture. They could require people who wanted to engage in such activities to be citizens of the town or city (in England, this was called having the “freedom of the town/city”). The others were relegated to unskilled work, petty trade and domestic service. Freeman status was hereditary, but could also be given to those who had served a formal apprenticeship in specified incorporated trades even if their father was not a freeman. It could also be purchased in many places, but the price varied considerably. Women inherited their father’s status – in some places, they lost it if they married a non-freeman, but in others, their husband could purchase the freedom at a reduced rate. It all depended on the town’s rules. Women also automatically acquired freedom of the town through marriage to a freeman. Freeman status usually entailed civic rights as well, such as the right to vote for members of the municipal government if an elected government existed – but only for men. Female “freemen” were not active citizens.

b. Guilds: Guilds could further restrict business freedom. They were closed professional organizations with multiple social, religious, economic and political functions which had originated in northern French towns in the eleventh century and spread rapidly to the Low Countries, Germany and England and could also be found in Spain, Italy and later Sweden, Austria and Poland – but they were not organized in southern France or the northern Low Countries (present-day Netherlands) until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Where recognized by local or central authorities, guilds enjoyed monopolies over the production of specific goods or the provision of certain services over a specified territory (normally, within town limits). They had the right to enact by-laws controlling where, how and by whom their trade could be conducted, as well as prescribe standards of workmanship. The idea was to prevent masters from competing with each other for what was deemed an inelastic consumer base, and maintain quality. Guilds could enjoy extensive policing rights to ensure regulations were followed, and were allowed to break clandestine workshops and seize their tools, raw material and finished goods. Finally, they vigorously fought those, including other guilds, whom they believed encroached on their privileges.

Guilds were hierarchical organizations; one joined first as an unpaid apprentice for a term of years that varied with place and trade (seven years in England). Apprentices lived with their masters. Once their training was over, apprentices became journeymen/women and earned wages. Masters could only hire guilds journeymen. Journeymen could only work for masters of their guild, and guild members could only work at their trade. To become a master, a journeyman had to produce a masterpiece approved by guild jurors, pay an entrance fee and swear to abide by the guild’s rules (hence the term “sworn trade” found in some regions). He then gained the right to open his own workshop, get married, take an apprentice and hire journeymen. Apprenticeships – but not masterpieces – were usually waived for masters’ sons; they also paid a lower entry fee. In the sixteenth century and later, one could also buy membership outright (at least in France and England). Guilds gave their members a sense of identity and defined their place in the social hierarchy as well as their functions, responsibilities and privileges – which could include political rights – and this reinforced their masculinist dimension.

With few exceptions guilds were male associations, and women’s membership was derivative. Some French, English, Spanish, Low Country and German guilds had accepted small numbers of female apprentices and admitted women to their freedom in the Middle Ages. About 10% of apprentices in medieval London were girls. Five of the 101 guilds in thirteenth-century Paris were all-female ones (all working silk) and 20 were mixed ones. The female guilds were supervised by men, but women in the mixed guilds could take part in administration and be inspectresses. Women were not confined to “feminine” crafts – they were bakeresses and butchers, farriers and millers as well as coppersmiths.

Cologne is also well known for its late medieval female guilds members. In the early fifteenth century, only tailors, cloth cutters and harness makers restricted women’s participation. The yarn makers (incorporated in 1397), the gold spinners (1397) and the silk makers (1437) were female guilds, which were co-administered by men and had no political powers contrary to the male ones. They regrouped women belonging to large-scale merchant families, managing the production end of the family import–export business. Between 1437 and 1504, 78 of the 113 silk mistresses were married or widowed and their (late) husband traded in raw or finished silk. A significant number were, or had been, married not only to a merchant, but to a city council member, and they were part of an emergent capitalist economy.

But the great majority of guilds did not formally apprentice girls who thus could not become mistresses in their own right. Women nonetheless had a role to play in the guilds. Masters’ wives managed a household which may include live-in apprentices and journeymen. They were also expected to assist their husband in his trade if it was carried out at home, and therefore may learn it. Generally speaking, the men concentrated on the production side of the craft, and women on the commercial one: they purchased the raw material, kept the accounts, paid the workers and sold the finished products from the workshop or a market stall. In many places, daughters were assumed to have learned their father’s trade, and female servants may be put to work in the workshop, but neither daughters nor wives nor servants were given formal recognition for their skills and knowledge. Their training could nonetheless be recognized in a roundabout way; in most places, widows were allowed to continue their husband’s trade, keep his apprentice, and even take new ones. But they could not take part in the guild’s assembly, vote or become guild officer.

c. Regional and central governments: The powers of guilds were neither uniform nor static. They varied from place to place and over time. In some parts of the southern Netherlands and Germany, guilds were for a while so powerful that they controlled the local governments. Southern Germany had weak states and strong guilds. Germany was not unified, but an aggregate of dozens of independent states of varying sizes and of free imperial cities, and they suffered greatly during the Thirty Years War. In order to survive, many of those states granted local bodies (guilds, town councils, local courts) extensive regulatory powers in exchange for money and soldiers. From the sixteenth century onwards, southern German guilds and municipal authorities used those powers to tightly regulate not only production and distribution, but every aspect of people’s lives: where they could live and with whom, whom they could marry, how they could dress and what consumer goods they could purchase. Local authorities, through their myriad of rules, controlled people’s income and how they could spend it. Although under attack by political thinkers and philosophers throughout the eighteenth century, German guilds preserved their power until the first half of the nineteenth century. (They were abolished in 1795 in French-conquered Rhineland and in piecemeal fashion elsewhere.)

In other places, the state successfully consolidated power in its own hands at the expense of local authorities and asserted its control over guilds. This was especially the case of guilds created in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Those guilds lacked political power and their statutes or their modifications had to be approved by outside authorities. In Leiden, guilds were forbidden and the city government had set up crafts organizations whose membership was automatic instead. In France, the royal government systematically, and usually successfully, sought to enlarge its powers at the expense of local and regional bodies. It assumed authority over the guilds and used them as an instrument of social control and planned economic development, as well as fiscal resources. In the sixteenth century, it forbade municipalities from incorporating guilds or approving their statutes, reserving this right for itself. Many southern French trade-based religious associations (confraternities) were pressured to reorganize into sworn trades in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 1674 a royal edict required people in free productive or distributive trades to join existing guilds or incorporate if they operated in an already gildated town. The order was not widely obeyed. The government also failed to incorporate the rapidly growing number of new trades into the guild system, and after 1691 was content to subject them to generic regulations. As in Germany, guilds came under attack as obstacles to economic progress and for being contrary to people’s right to work in the eighteenth century. In 1776, the French government tried to abolish them, but had to backtrack in the face of massive opposition to the measure. French guilds were abolished during the Revolution, in 1790.

Guilds could also lose power gradually, as in England, where they were undermined in a piecemeal, haphazard fashion over those three centuries, by lack of court and government support. The Statute of Artificers of 1563 imposed quotas on the number of apprentices a master could take (proportional to the number of journeymen) and this limited the number of craftsmen. But it also allowed people who had completed their apprenticeship and gained civic freedom to practise their trade wherever they wanted, except in Norwich and London where the permission of a local guild was required. Guilds’ policing powers and prohibitions against masters hiring non-guild members were thrown into question by a court decision in 1599. A 1614 statute allowed guild members to join any of a town’s incorporated trades as soon as they had finished their apprenticeship. This resulted in guilds like the London Haberdashers’ Company being made up mostly of people in other lines of trade. In London, the Livery Companies, as guilds were called, were further weakened by the fact that their jurisdiction did not extend much beyond the medieval city walls, where more and more people lived and worked, and by the Great Fire which levelled the city in 1666. Membership in the Companies consequently declined, and their welfare and charity functions assumed increased prominence at the expense of the economic ones. In the late 1670s, the Livery Companies admitted about 2,100 Freemen a year, but only 1,250 in the mid-eighteenth century and about 950 from the 1760s to 1790s. The Statute of Artificers, and formal apprenticeships, were abolished in 1814 and the guild systems shortly afterwards, although the London Livery Companies lasted until the middle of the century.

II. Women in the early modern world

Women were subjected to local and extra-local economic regulations like men, but they faced additional constraints stemming from the meaning contemporaries gave to sexual difference, and their ability to go into business depended on cultural and legal factors, as much as on their abilities, desire or need to do so.

A. Women’s nature

Medieval and early modern societies deemed women to be inferior or defective human beings, physically weaker, less intelligent, less rational and consequently less able to control their passions and more inclined to sexual immorality than men. For the sake of th...