Gender and work in the Early Modern Period
- Created by: Alasdair
- Created on: 22-05-18 14:07
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- Gender and work in the Early Modern Period (according to Bernard Capp)
- Farming
- Most boys throughout Europe
- destined for a life working the land
- either on family holding or by becoming a live-in farm servant in their teens
- learnt skills on job
- destined for a life working the land
- Many young women
- Also helped on family farm or where hired as diary-maids
- Expected and required, farmer's wife would play active role, taking responsibility for:
- Poultry
- Pigs
- Vegetable garden
- Running the diary
- Helping with hay-making and harvest
- Most boys throughout Europe
- In towns
- Craft or trade
- Minority of young men
- Mostly from more prosperous backgrounds
- Worked as apprentice and later journeyman for an established master
- Family buisness (craft and trade)
- often women worked alongside their husbands
- women usually took charge of selling produce at market
- Often a widow enjoyed the right to continue business after the husband's death
- Increasingly, however, guild regulations wee tightening to exclude women from membership
- Many powerful German guilds barred female servants from working in the shop, often master's wife, widow and daughters too
- According to Wiesner
- Women were seen as unwelcome competition
- Mere presence of women (and that of lower-class or illegitimate men) was perceived as compromising 'honour' of guild
- According to Wiesner
- often women worked alongside their husbands
- Craft or trade
- According to Perry
- In Spain
- Thousands of women entered silk-weavers' guild in Seville
- By mid-C17th most had become ill-paid piece-workers, with guilds increasingly restricting freedom of women, even master-weavers' widows, to operate businesses independently
- In Spain
- Almost everywhere, women were pushed into lowly and marginal occupations that had never been organised into guilds
- In a few trades which men had never colonised, such as lace-making and millinery, they could sometimes earn reasonably good incomes
- Far more often they entered domestic service or worked in poorly paid activities such as:
- Spinning
- Knitting
- Laundering
- Sewing
- Nursing
- Women also worked in large numbers in alehouses, taverns and 'fast-food' urban cook-shops or as street vendors, and they dominated huge second-hand clothing market
- Poor of both sexes would often follow several occupations, switching according to season and circumstance
- According to Capp
- Thus one woman explained in 1687 that she worked at home winding silk on rainy days, but as a porter at Leadenhall market when it was fine
- Whatever they did, women generally had to juggle paid work with demands of child-care and running the home
- According to Capp
- Farming
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