In the next chapters, we shall examine in detail the development of womenâs work in relation to the great evolutions that characterised the early modern age, but first it will be useful to propose a brief historiographical overview.
Since the early decades of the twentieth century, some pioneering research, to which we shall return, has been carried out, especially in England and in particular at the London School of Economics. In an article from 1992, Maxine Berg drew attention to the important contribution made by some women historians to economic history, from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution, including Eileen Power, Alice Clark and Ivy Pinchbeck, concluding that: âthe decline of women in the economic history profession has, it seems, coincided with their exclusion from our historical memoryâ (Berg 1992). These three historians carried out fundamental research on womenâs work, Eileen Power in relation to the middle ages, Alice Clark for the early modern age and Ivy Pinchbeck for the industrialisation era, suggesting readings and interpretations that have influenced historiography to this day. The tradition of research on these issues has remained alive and, in Britain, the historiographical production on womenâs work in early modern times is vast and constantly evolving. During the course of the book, reference will often be made to this abundant bibliography, but the English case is not the main focus of the book, one of the aims of which is precisely to broaden the framework and adopt as European a perspective as possible.
Louise Tillyâs and Joan Scottâs book: Women, Work and Family, published in 1978, which focuses on the evolution of womenâs work in England and France from 1700 to 1950 (Tilly and Scott 1978) represents an important milestone in the debate on the role of womenâs work in history and has become a model for other historical periods as well. Tilly and Scott showed the continuity between the types of work that women did before, during and after the development of industrial capitalism. Later research confirmed that, for much of the nineteenth century, both men and women were employed mainly in the traditional sectors of the urban economy and that, even in England, it was in those sectors (crafts , commerce, services ), and not in manufacturing, that the greatest increase in female employment was recorded (Hill 1989). Above all, Tilly and Scott analysed womenâs work in relation to family roles and family models, drawing attention to the market work activities carried out by women in their homes. In their introduction to the new 1987 edition, they insisted that productive and reproductive roles within the family should not be seen as ânaturalâ, but as political and ideological constructs: âreproduction is a culturally defined, socially organized activity; it has no inherent or inevitable social consequence for womenâ (Tilly and Scott 1987: 8).
Any history of womenâs work must therefore consider the pivotal role attributed by Tilly and Scott to the family and in particular assess any:
bargaining, negotiation and domination as well as consensus about what family interest was. Conflict erupted because of unequal power relationships [âŚ] family members invoked competing ideologies to justify their actions [âŚ]. These negotiations at once accepted and questioned existing concepts of households and family roles. Future research needs to focus on such family bargaining and decision making as a way of understanding behavior for this will shed new light on the ways in which existing division of labor by age and sex were transformed or reproduced. (Tilly Scott 1987: 9)
The authors used the words ânegotiationâ, âbargainingâ and âconflictâ, but not the concept of âagencyâ, which was brought to gender history by Edward P. Thompsonâs âhistory from belowâ, as well as by the rethinking of Foucault and Derrida, through Judith Butlerâs feminist criticism and has become central to womenâs economic history in more recent years (Montenach 2012; Fazio 2013). In 2013, in their introduction to the volume Female Agency in the Urban Economy, Anne Montenach and Deborah Simonton pointed out that âthe concept of agency seldom has been explicitly used and discussed by early modern historiansâ and declared the need to:
illustrate the circumstances under which women could rise above their restrictive situations, and illuminate the factors â age, marital and social status, political or economic climate â that determined their ability to manage their own lives [âŚ] Agency here is not conceptualized strictly in terms of resistance to male authority or patriarchal patterns, but arose from the variety of everyday interactions in which women accommodated, negotiated or manipulated social rules and gender roles. (Montenach and Simonton 2013: 4â5)
In addition to the concept of âagencyâ, recent research developments in womenâs history deal with the concept of âcapabilitiesâ, that is, according to Amartya Sen, âwhat a person can do and can beâ. âCapability involves an understanding of the individualâs freedom to operate and an ability to participate in economic, social and political actionsâ (Fontaine 2013: 56). Agency and capabilities must be related to the âresourcesâ to which women, or men, can have access, as well as to the ability to search for, and create such resources.
In their introduction to the 1987 edition, Tilly and Scott also specified that their analysis included the work for the market carried out by women at home, but not unpaid âreproductiveâ work and âcareâ work, performed by wives and mothers primarily, but also daughters, unmarried aunts and other family members. This is a very long-standing issue, but its characteristics change throughout history (Davidson 1982; Hill 1989). The distinction between âproductiveâ and âreproductiveâ work is rejected by feminist economy research (Duffy 2011) even if it is almost impossible to assess this work economically, unless we can establish an equivalence with the wages of people who carried out the same type of activity as paid work, namely servants , nurses, cooks and so on (Folbre and Wagman 1993).
Research on womenâs work contributes then to the redefinition of the concept of work that, in the Swedish research project Gender & Work directed by Maria Ă
gren, is defined as any activity that allowed people to âmake a livingâ (Ă
gren 2017). Nevertheless, family members have always performed âproductiveâ unpaid work in their family shops: the sale, accounting, organisation work carried out by the wives of the craftsmen or shopkeepers, as well as the craft work that the wives and children of masters carried out in workshops, were not assessed in terms of wages (Martini and Bellavitis 2014; Bellavitis et al. 2016; Bellavitis 2018). In actual fact, the work of master craftsmen, traders or shopkeepers was never assessed in terms of wages either, but the difference lies in their social status and also, as we shall see in more detail below, in the assessment of these roles made by quantitative sources. Master craftsmen and shopkeepers appeared in censuses and tax roles as âactiveâ, whereas their wives, who also worked, were rarely considered as such. The question of sources is one of the central problems in womenâs history, and we shall look into it in more detail in the following pages.
In 1990, the History of Women in the West, edited by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot, was published in Italy and the French edition came out in 1991. Immediately translated into many other languages, the series represented an important international and collective attempt to provide a summary of womenâs history in Western Europe and America. It was followed by many others, and replaced more recently by âglobalâ assessments (Meade and Weisner-Hanks 2004). The third volume, Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes, opened with the essay âWomen, work and familyâ by Olwen Hufton (Hufton 1990 and 1993 for the English edition), who highlighted how the work of women in early modern times was part of a âmakeshift economyâ, characterised by precarious work and the need to find solutions to poverty on a daily basis. In the wake of these studies, an important line of research has developed on the role of women in illegal activities such as theft or smuggling (Rublack 1999; Montenach 2013, 2015), which has also highlighted, as we shall see, cases of leniency by the authorities, within a moral economy aimed at protecting the weakest members of society.
In 1990, the Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Institute of Economic History Francesco Datini of Prato, La donna nellâeconomia, secc. XIIIâXVIII (Woman in economy, thirteenthâeighteenth centuries), held in 1989, were also published. The conference helped to recognise the topic of womenâs work as a central one for economic history, but the most interesting methodological proposals came from the debate and round tables that, as was the tradition of the conferences of the Istituto Datini, were included in the volume of the proceedings. During the round table on urban work, Angela Groppi called for avoiding a too rigid distinction between male and female work, not to remain bogged down in the model of the family economy, which ignores economically active women alone, and introduced the concept of the economic âvalueâ of women (Groppi 1990), that she developed in the volume The Work of Women, the third of a series on the history of women in Italy, which is considered as the âItalian responseâ to the History of Women in the West, and was published in 1996. This book is still a fundamental point of reference, but unfortunately it was never translated into English and therefore is little known outside Italy (Groppi 1996a). A very important aspect of the interpretative approach proposed by Angela Groppi, and developed in particular with regard to the early modern age, is precisely the interweaving of work and rights: in particular, the distinction between womenâs work and womenâs value, or rather between womenâs ability to produce wealth through their work and their characteristic of âbeingâ wealth, as bearers of dowries , in the specific context of the Roman legal tradition:
The fact that laws and statutes pr...