Reconsidering Women's Labor Force Participation Rates in Eighteenth-Century Turin

Micheletto, Beatrice Zucca

doi:10.1080/13545701.2013.842283

Cited by 12 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…That finding indeed leads us to question the validity of De Moor's and Van Zanden analytical model for Portugal. Similar results have been contributed to other regions of southern Europe (Zucca Micheletto 2011, 2013; Sarasúa 2019). Moreover, more widows and married women than single women are recorded in our sources as having occupations.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 86%

“…Portugal is no exception so we experienced similar difficulties to those faced by any of our European colleagues wishing to study women's labour and economic activities in the early modern period (Van Nederveen Meerkerk 2006, 2012; Zucca Micheletto 2011, 2013, 2014; Sarasúa 2019; among others).…”

Section: Sources: Problems and Solutionsmentioning

confidence: 83%

“…Since its publication, De Moor's and Van Zanden model has received a great deal of criticism for its failure to take into account regional variations and differences between rural and urban areas within southern Europe, where marriage patterns, family structures and systems of inheritance differed with consequent implications for female participation in the various economic regions of the vast Mediterranean Basin (Zucca Micheletto 2011, 2013; Bellavitis and Zucca Micheletto 2018; Sarasúa 2019; among others).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Reconsidering the Southern European Model: Marital Status, Women's Work and Labour Relations in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Portugal

Silva

Carvalhal

2020

RHE / JILAEH

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Challenging current ideas in mainstream scholarship on differences between female labour force participation in southern and north-western Europe and their impact on economic development, this article shows that in Portugal, neither marriage nor widowhood prevented women from participating in the labour market of mid-eighteenth-century. Our research demonstrates that marriage provided women with the resources they needed to work in various capacities in all economic sectors.This article also argues that single Portuguese women had an incentive to work and did so mostly as wage earners. Finally, the comparison of our dataset on female occupations from tax records with other European cases calls for a revision of the literature and the development of a more nuanced picture of the north-south divide.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 86%

Section: Sources: Problems and Solutionsmentioning

confidence: 83%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Reconsidering the Southern European Model: Marital Status, Women's Work and Labour Relations in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Portugal

Silva

Carvalhal

2020

RHE / JILAEH

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“…The under‐recording of women's work, particularly married women's work, has been documented elsewhere. In Turin, for example, the 1802 Napoleonic census showed a participation rate for women of 33.3%, yet according to the registers of the Ospedale di Carità, the city's main charitable institution, 63.2% of women had paid occupations; Zucca Micheletto, ‘Reconsidering’, p. 211.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Women's work and structural change: occupational structure in eighteenth‐century Spain

Sarasúa

2018

The Economic History Review

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This article uses the declarations of householders in the Cadaster of Ensenada to calculate labour participation rates for women and men from 22 localities in inland Spain. The article establishes the actual levels of women's market activity, which are much higher than commonly assumed. This unique source also makes it possible to analyse the region's occupational structure. Due to the labour-intensive character of manufacturing work, the abundant supply of cheap labour, the diffusion of cottage industries, and the demand for commodities from internal and colonial markets, a large portion of the region's population worked in manufactures in the eighteenth century. This finding challenges standard interpretations of the Spanish economy at this time as mostly agricultural, which rely on sources that exclude women workers. Most workers in the manufacturing sector were women, and their market activity was concentrated in textile manufacturing. Once women are included in the analyses, the industrial share of employment follows a U-shaped trajectory from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century. The article concludes that the standard interpretation of structural change, based solely on empirical evidence for male workers, gives a misleading picture of when, where, why, and how structural change occurred.

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“…In this sense, female work was a 'dutiful contribution' required in order to earn a livelihood and ensure the maintenance of the family, with no social acknowledgement. This also explains why most work done by women was largely unrecorded in Turin as well as in other European societies (Humphries & Sarasúa, 2012;Zucca Micheletto, 2013). For unpaid work Only unpaid labour force?…”

Section: Discovering Female Labour Force In the Family Businessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Only unpaid labour force? Women's and girls' work and property in family business in early modern Italy

Micheletto

2014

The History of the Family

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This paper aims to investigate the nature of the women's contribution in family businesses in eighteenth-century Turin. Specifically, it discusses the reliability of the notion of unpaid work; it suggests that the latter is a too ambiguous concept and that some kind of distinction which clarifies the role played by each family member should be introduced. Economic and labour relationships between the partners or between the head of the household and other women of the family network were complicated by the presence of the female's personal property, and especially by the dowry. Married women invested in the family business their dowry or, alternatively, they used it in order to set up and run an independent economic activity or to buy a set of tools that enabled them to work autonomously. Widows (mothers or mothers-in-law) did the same. Women therefore were workers and owners at the same time. Their economic contribution to the household was based on an intricate mixture of physical work and property, and precisely for this reason they cannot be considered as an unpaid labour force. Finally, the paper shows that property gave the women the bargaining power necessary to negotiate their position in the household or to obtain some kind of help or support.

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Reconsidering Women's Labor Force Participation Rates in Eighteenth-Century Turin

Cited by 12 publications

References 13 publications

Reconsidering the Southern European Model: Marital Status, Women's Work and Labour Relations in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Portugal

Reconsidering the Southern European Model: Marital Status, Women's Work and Labour Relations in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Portugal

Women's work and structural change: occupational structure in eighteenth‐century Spain

Only unpaid labour force? Women's and girls' work and property in family business in early modern Italy

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