à E l i s e v a n N e d e r v e e n M e e r k e r k Summary: This article analyses women's work in the Dutch textile industry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries within the framework of dual (or segmented) labour market theory. This theoretical framework is usually applied to the modern labour market, but it is also valuable for historical research. It clarifies, for example, how segmentation in the labour market influenced men's and women's work in the textile industry. Applying this analysis, we find that, even in periods without explicit gender conflict, patriarchal and capitalist forces utilized the gender segmentation of the labour market to redefine job status and labour relations in periods of economic change. Although this could harm the economic position of all women and migrants, it appears that single women were affected most by these mechanisms.Capitalistic organisation tended [:::] to deprive women of opportunities for sharing in the more profitable forms of production, confining them as wageearners to the unprotected trades. 1 In her pioneering study from 1919, Alice Clark pointed out that in preindustrial times women had played a large part in production. But the rise of capitalism and industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries changed things radically, for production was then taken out of the home and consequently out of the hands of women.
2In the 1970s feminist historians like Louise Tilly and Joan Scott reverted to Clark's idea that female workers had once experienced a ''golden age'', which they believed should be linked to the specific functioning of the preindustrial family economy, in which reproduction, production, and consumption were closely connected. Because pre-industrial production often took place in the domestic sphere, women had a large share in it.
In the historical debate, the gender wage gap is usually attributed either to productivity differences or to gender discrimination. By analysing a newly constructed series of spinning wages in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, the wages of male and female textile workers for the same work could be investigated. At first sight, the evidence on equal piece rates for spinning men and women seems to rule out wage discrimination. Nevertheless, more deeply rooted gender discrimination resulting from the segmented seventeenth-century labour market restricted women's access to many professions. Exactly this segmentation determined differences in wage earning capacities between men and women. I 'Sex segregation and differences in payment between men and women are highly intertwined. Women's work was usually low-paid, but it also worked the other way around: if a certain position was poorly rewarded, it was usually women's work'. 2 I n recent years, the gender wage gap has received ample attention from economic and social historians. Most historians acknowledge that there have been significant differences in the rewarding of men's and women's work through space and time. For the pre-industrial period, various studies have shown that-spatial and temporal variations notwithstanding-women's wages generally constituted between one-third and two-thirds those of men. 3 Therefore, rather than on the question of if women and men received different payment, the historical debate has usually focused on the nature and causes of these variations in remuneration. 4 Proponents of neo-classical economic theory assume that wage rates depend purely on supply and demand in the labour market. Wages equal the marginal 1 I wish to thank the editors and anonymous referees of the Economic History Review, as well as Bas van Bavel,
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