Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe

WOMEN’S WORK AND RIGHTS IN EARLY MODERN URBAN EUROPE

Anna Bellavitis

Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe

Anna Bellavitis

Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe

Anna Bellavitis University of Rouen Rouen, France Based on a translation from the Italian language edition: Il lavoro delle donne nelle città dell’Europa moderna, by Anna Bellavitis Copyright © Viella s.r.l. 2016 All Rights Reserved Translated by Clelia Boscolo

ISBN 978-3-319-96540-6    ISBN 978-3-319-96541-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96541-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018954064 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Granger Historical Picture Archive / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Mathieu, Marguerite and Giovanni

Preface

Women Have Always Worked is the title of a book published in the United States in 1981 and of another published in France in 2002, and perhaps also of others of which I am not aware (Kesler Harris 1981; Schweitzer 2002). It seems strange to still have to remember this trivial truth, yet it still happens to hear people say ‘Since women have worked…’, as if they had never done it ‘before’. The real novelty of the last decades is that, in very different quantities and in very different ways from one country to another, women have had access, more than in the past, to roles of power and responsibility: the so-called glass ceiling has been scaled up, although not yet broken. However, competition between men and women in the labour market, which may seem typical of the contemporary world and perhaps a consequence of feminism, is in fact a constant element in the history of work, as we shall see. Women work at home and outside the home, and have always done so, even if, in recent years, due to the economic crisis, but also in part as a result of new expectations and values of life, many women in Western countries have ‘returned home’, abandoning paid work outside, or doing it from home, thanks to the new technologies. We are talking about periods close to us, but the evolutions of technology and economy, as well as the values and ideals of each society, have always had a decisive influence on the possibilities that, throughout history, women have had to gain access to paid employment and, more vii

viii Preface

g­ enerally, to play a significant role in the economy, not to mention biology, that is the fact that for a part of their lives women can be pregnant, give birth, breastfeed. At the time of the French Revolution, Condorcet wrote that he could not understand why women’s transient illnesses— menstruation, pregnancy and so on—should prevent them from enjoying citizenship rights, when no one would think of depriving them of the male individuals who suffered periodically from gout or cold, but it is clear that reproductive activities can prevent women from carrying out certain work tasks or from leaving home. Production and reproduction have always been a problem that women have to face and the solutions can be various, today as in the past, even if we have to abandon the idea, apparently taken for granted, that mothers of children worked less: on the contrary, often their working rhythm increased as a consequence of the increase of mouths to feed and the care of newborns was given to other women of the family or to wet nurses. The real and symbolic value of work changes from one society to another and from one era to another, and women’s work has certainly not always been valued, either in the past or in the present. For women, gender identity prevails over work identity: rather than “female workers”, we still speak of “working women” (Sullerot 1968; Simonton 2006). These are phenomena of very long duration and structures from which we have not yet come out. Women’s wages were most of the time lower than men’s because, even when they were the only source of livelihood for a person or an entire family, they were considered to be ‘complementary wages’ compared to the main wage of the husband and head of the family. In order to construct this concept, a constant and pervasive work had to be carried out to belittle women’s activities, to consider them as unskilled even when they were skilled, to defend them or to prevent women from accessing training, education and apprenticeship, to keep them in a state of real and psychological minority and subordination and to persuade them of their lesser value. And what can be said about the domestic work and care of wives, mothers, sisters and minors, which is not recognised and not remunerated because it is considered natural and which, even in contemporary societies, is carried out more by women than by men? Research into women’s work, gender relations and, more generally, into the relationship between gender history and labour history in early

 Preface 

ix

modern Europe is now extensive and it would be impossible to summarise it in its entirety. The geographical coverage of the volume, Italy, France, Germany, England, Spain, Netherlands, some forays into Poland, Portugal, Scotland and Scandinavia, reflects the state of the art, my limited linguistic knowledge and my personal research interests, but it would be absurd, on a subject of such vastness and on which the bibliography continues to be enriched, to demand completeness. Moreover, in recent years, new important research has enlarged our horizons to the history of women in the Ottoman Empire showing also that in cities under Islamic law, like Cairo or Istanbul, women had sometimes more important property rights than in north-western Europe, regardless of their marital status (Hunt 2009; Sperling and Wray 2010). The purpose of this book is not and cannot be to offer a complete overview of decades of research, but rather to question chronologies, evolutions and geographical polarisations that are too often considered obvious. The title of the book brings together three terms: women, work and rights. It might seem more logical to associate these terms in the context of contemporary labour history and trade-union claims over the last two centuries. However, as we shall see in detail, the three terms must also be associated in the context of early modern history, when we think about women’s rights to education, to the management of their property, to accessing public space, all important topics for a gendered history of work covering that period. The book is organised in three parts. The first one presents a brief overview of the historiographical production on the topic and of the geography of women’s rights to property and to education and will present some examples of female careers in the arts and sciences. The second part presents a choice of occupations that are traditionally considered as typically ‘female’, including those activities that are linked to female bodies, as breastfeeding, prostitution and midwifery, but also domestic service. The third part focuses on women’s activities in urban crafts and trades. The book is the revised and expanded version of the book Il lavoro delle donne nelle città dell’Europa moderna (2016), published by Viella in the series ‘Storia delle donne e di genere’ (History of Women and Gender) of the Società Italiana delle Storiche (Italian Society of Women Historians). I would like to thank Cecilia Palombelli and Vira Lanciotti for the

x Preface

e­ nthusiasm and professionalism with which they followed the Italian edition and the friends of the Società Italiana delle Storiche for the years spent working and planning together. Angela Groppi has followed this project from the beginning and without her support and advice the book would never have been completed. In 2017, the book received the ‘Gisa Giani’ prize, for which I warmly thank the jury and in particular its president Angiolina Arru and the Istituto per la Storia dell’Umbria Contemporanea (Institute for the History of Contemporary Umbria). The book is the synthesis of the research of many historians, and with some of them I have had the chance to work in the last years, in the context of joint research programmes, such as the research project ‘Travail en famille, travail non rémunéré en Europe (XVe–XXIe siècle)’ of the Ecole Française de Rome and the research project ‘Producing Change. Gender and Work in Early Modern Europe’, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, and more generally in the occasion of international conferences and workshops: in particular Maria Agren, Laura Casella, Amy L. Erickson, Ida Fazio, Nadia Filippini, Margaret Hunt, Victoria Lopez Barahona, Manuela Martini, Luca Molà, Anne Montenach, Monica Martinat, Carmen Sarasua, Raffaella Sarti, Ariadne Schmidt, Alexandra Shepard, Deborah Simonton, Angels Solà and Beatrice Zucca Micheletto. I would like to thank Clelia Boscolo for the wise and patient translation, and the Institut Universitaire de France that funded it, and Laura Pacey and Clara Heathcock for accepting and following the English edition with patience and professionalism. Rouen, France

Anna Bellavitis

References Hunt, M. (2009). Women in Eighteenth-Century Europe. Abingdon/New York: Routledge. Kessler Harris, A. (1981). Women Have Always Worked. A Historical Overview. New York: Feminist Press. Schweitzer, S. (2002). Les femmes ont toujours travaillé. Une histoire du travail des femmes aux XIXe et XXe siècles. Paris: Odile Jacob.

 Preface 

xi

Simonton, D. (Ed.). (2006). The Routledge History of Women in Europe Since 1700. London/New York: Routledge. Sperling, J.  G., & Kelly Wray, S. (Eds.). (2010). Across the Religious Divide. Women, Property, and Law in the Wider Mediterranean (ca. 1300–1800). New York/London: Routledge. Sullerot, E. (1968). Histoire et sociologie du travail feminine. Paris: Gonthier-Denoël.

Contents

Part I Women, Work, Rights and the City

   1

1 Women Have Always Worked   3 2 The Gender of Work  19 3 Working Daughters, Wives, Mothers, Sisters, Widows  31 4 The ‘Decline Thesis’ and the Guilds: An ‘Accordion Movement’?  43 5 From Globalisation to Industrialisation  57 6 Agency and Capabilities: North Versus South?  69 7 The Right to Learn, the Right to Teach: Intellectual and  Artistic Work as a Profession  87

xiii

xiv Contents

Part II Women’s Jobs

 109

8 Servants and Slaves 111 9 Caring and Feeding 129 10 Midwives 145 11 Bodies as Resources 157

Part III Workshops and Markets

 169

12 Learning at Home and on the Shop Floor 171 13 Women, Families, Guilds and the French Exception 183 14 Silk and Skill 197 15 Printed Tracks 209 16 In the Market Place 219 17 International Traders 235

Part IV Conclusions

 251

18 Conclusion: Changes and Continuity 253 Index 263

Part I Women, Work, Rights and the City

1 Women Have Always Worked

In the next chapters, we shall examine in detail the development of women’s 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: “the decline of women in the economic history profession has, it seems, coincided with their exclusion from our historical memory” (Berg 1992). These three historians carried out fundamental research on women’s 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 women’s work in early modern times is vast and constantly © The Author(s) 2018 A. Bellavitis, Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96541-3_1

3

4 

A. Bellavitis

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 Tilly’s and Joan Scott’s book: Women, Work and Family, published in 1978, which focuses on the evolution of women’s work in England and France from 1700 to 1950 (Tilly and Scott 1978) represents an important milestone in the debate on the role of women’s 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 women’s 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 “natural”, but as political and ideological constructs: “reproduction is a culturally defined, socially organized activity; it has no inherent or inevitable social consequence for women” (Tilly and Scott 1987: 8). Any history of women’s 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 […] family members invoked competing ideologies to justify their actions […]. 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)

  Women Have Always Worked 

5

The authors used the words “negotiation”, “bargaining” and “conflict”, but not the concept of “agency”, which was brought to gender history by Edward P. Thompson’s “history from below”, as well as by the rethinking of Foucault and Derrida, through Judith Butler’s feminist criticism and has become central to women’s 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 “the concept of agency seldom has been explicitly used and discussed by early modern historians” and declared the need to: illustrate the circumstances under which women could rise above their restrictive situations, and illuminate the factors – age, marital and social status, political or economic climate  – that determined their ability to manage their own lives […] 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: 4–5)

In addition to the concept of ‘agency’, recent research developments in women’s history deal with the concept of ‘capabilities’, that is, according to Amartya Sen, “what a person can do and can be”. “Capability involves an understanding of the individual’s freedom to operate and an ability to participate in economic, social and political actions” (Fontaine 2013: 56). Agency and capabilities must be related to the ‘resources’ 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 ‘reproductive’ work and ‘care’ 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 “productive” and “reproductive” work is rejected by feminist economy research (Duffy 2011) even if it is almost impossible to

6 

A. Bellavitis

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 women’s work contributes then to the redefinition of the concept of work that, in the Swedish research project Gender & Work directed by Maria Ågren, is defined as any activity that allowed people to “make a living” (Ågren 2017). Nevertheless, family members have always performed “productive” 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 ‘active’, whereas their wives, who also worked, were rarely considered as such. The question of sources is one of the central problems in women’s 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 women’s history in Western Europe and America. It was followed by many others, and replaced more recently by “global” assessments (Meade and Weisner-Hanks 2004). The third volume, Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes, opened with the essay “Women, work and family” 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 “makeshift economy”, 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

  Women Have Always Worked 

7

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 nell’economia, secc. XIII–XVIII (Woman in economy, thirteenth–eighteenth centuries), held in 1989, were also published. The conference helped to recognise the topic of women’s 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 “value” 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 “Italian response” 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 women’s work and women’s value, or rather between women’s ability to produce wealth through their work and their characteristic of “being” wealth, as bearers of dowries, in the specific context of the Roman legal tradition: The fact that laws and statutes provided specific mechanisms for the protection of dowries, to protect them from being squandered or badly administered by husbands, made them a particularly valuable asset, which could be saved from the onslaught of creditors, thus not only protecting women but their entire families from unfortunate investments or bankruptcies. (Groppi 1996b: 148)

More recently, the role of the dowry in the history of the Italian family was called into question by Tine De Moor and Ian Luiten Van Zanden,

8 

A. Bellavitis

who proposed the existence of a link between the so-called European marriage pattern (EMP), in its North-Western version, the possibilities of young women’s agency and economic independence and the more general economic development of the societies that practised it. It is a very interesting attempt to include the history of women and gender in the ‘great narrative’ of European economic development, which however is questionable, as it does not take enough into consideration the role of women’s work in European regions where the dowry system existed. According to this model, Southern Europe, characterised by the Roman legal tradition and the separation of property between spouses, did not offer young women any incentive to become economically independent or wives to invest in family businesses, whereas the customary systems of Northern Europe, based on the pooling of the wealth accumulated by betrothed couples before marriage, were an incentive to independence and women’s agency (De Moor and van Zanden 2010). We shall return later to some of the legal differences between European regions and their consequences on the economic activities of men and women, but it must be stressed that a dowry could be both the part of family inheritance destined to daughters and the fruit of their work. Despite being managed by husbands during marriage, it was recovered by women who were widowed. In fact, the geography of the laws on women’s economic rights was much more articulated than the simple polarisation between Southern Roman tradition and Northern customary laws: some regions of Northern Europe were influenced by Roman legal tradition, and customary laws were important in some regions of Southern Europe too (Fontaine 2013; Bellavitis and Zucca Micheletto 2018). The link between economic development, EMP and women’s agency has been criticised by Tracy Dennison and Sheilagh Ogilvie who, on the basis of the analysis of 4705 demographic observations, covering women’s marriage age, female lifetime celibacy and household complexity in 39 European countries, concluded that “there is no evidence that the EMP improved economic performance by empowering women, increasing human capital investment, adjusting population to economic trends, or sustaining beneficial cultural norms. European economic success was not caused by the EMP and its sources must therefore be sought in other factors” (Dennison and Ogilvie 2014: 651). Such a debate is part of a

  Women Have Always Worked 

9

more general discussion on the respective advantages to economic development of European family models (Carmichael et al. 2016). This discussion is often based on a stereotyped view of the Mediterranean family, which historical and anthropological research has deeply criticised, showing that it is not true that the nuclear family spread earlier in Northern Europe and that Mediterranean family models have long been characterised by low age at marriage and extended families (Barbagli 1984; Viazzo 2003; Fazio 2004, 2005; Alessi 2013). As Raffaella Sarti has written, Italy has been ‘a test’ of big generalisations and of models proposed by family historians and demographers: The great variety of situations in Italy has proved irreducible to any effort to bring the country back to a unique model of family formation and family structure. Not only that. Together with the data from the research on the Iberian Peninsula, it also made it possible to prove that, at least since the sixteenth-seventeenth century, the “Mediterranean” model suggested by Laslett has never existed: the characteristics that should have characterised it (high nuptiality rate and a high number of complex families) have rarely been seen together in Italy and in Spain. (Sarti 2006: 159)

In the last decades, in the field of economic history, and in particular work history, new themes and new spaces have come to make the historiographical landscape richer and more complex. The study of European history cannot be carried out without also taking a ‘global history’ approach and, as we shall see, the development of trade relations with the new world and the colonies had a direct influence on the job opportunities offered to women and more generally on the opportunities to become ‘agents’ in their lives. The role of women in the credit market, and more generally the opportunities they had to invest and make a profit on their capital, is another issue that has been at the core of recent research (Froide 2017). Finally, refined quantitative research has made it possible to highlight the characteristics of the female labour market and its effects on wage discrimination, which has always characterised women’s work (van Nederveen Meerkerk 2010; Humphries and Weisdorf 2015). Writing a history of women, after decades of research on gender history, may seem out of fashion. But, besides the fact that the international

10 

A. Bellavitis

production of monographs, collections of essays and articles on women’s history has never stopped, the history of women’s work and women’s rights sheds light on the gender identities of work and therefore, more generally, also on men’s work. The research that has focused on women’s work has, for example, highlighted how the figure of the male ‘breadwinner’ was an ideological and political construct, especially developed in the context of the fights for the recognition of rights of the last two centuries. Joan Scott’s essay in the volume on the nineteenth century of the History of Women in the West made it very clear what the combined effects of the industrialisation processes and of the philosophical debates on the ‘universal’ rights of ‘citizens’ in the context of the French Revolution had been. The so-called Industrial Revolution (a controversial term that we will discuss later) created many paradoxes: on the one hand, faced with the tragic consequences of the indiscriminate exploitation of women and children, a social critique developed, as well as the need for laws to protect children and motherhood; on the other hand, it was theorised that women’s wages must only complement men’s, and that women should therefore work outside the home only when strictly necessary. The political, social and economic debate on the Industrial Revolution led to the identification of the husbands and fathers as ‘breadwinners’ for the whole family, while the women’s wages had to be lower and, as such, ‘complementary’. At the same time, women, identified as “nature”, were excluded from the “public” space of politics, reserved for men (Scott 1990 and 1993 for the English edition). As we shall see in detail in the course of the book, in the early modern period the family model was not so different, except that the problem of ‘universal rights’ did not arise. The so-called universal suffrage, in fact limited by wealth, that was achieved in the nineteenth century excluded women while affirming the domestic ideal of the ‘housewife’. According to a strong historiographical tradition, particularly on the English case, between the end of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, this “domestic ideal” had important consequences on work opportunities offered to women from the “bourgeoisie” who were excluded both from the public and productive spheres at the same time (Davidoff and Hall 1987). The issue of the separation of a “male” public sphere from a “female” domestic sphere within the bour-

  Women Have Always Worked 

11

geois society of nineteenth-century England has given rise to important studies and is still the subject of debates (Barker 2006; Phillips 2006; Davidoff and Hall 2014). However, research on women’s work has shown not only that women have always worked, but that censuses and population statistics tended to underestimate their work. In the early modern and modern periods, the classifications used by censuses and tax lists, based almost always on the family nucleus, did not allow, except in very rare cases, female work to appear. The origins of the “male breadwinner ideology” go back a long way (Horrell and Humphries 1997; Gray 2000; Humphries 2010), but it has been suggested that, in the early modern period, the fact that wives were in charge of managing, saving and increasing household assets “lent an occupational dimension to the term ‘wife’” (Shepard 2015a: 257). The so-called U curve of statistics on female labour, according to which, in the nineteenth century, the rate of female activity fell as compared to the early modern age, and then went up again during the twentieth century, could then be a statistical bias, due to the different identifications of women and their activities (Folbre 1991; Humphries and Sarasúa 2012). The three terms in the title: women, work and rights are situated in a defined space, the city, understood as a space that, during the early modern age, was shaped by the experience of men and women: a space that was at the same time very rigid and structured by economic and political institutions but also very open to any possibility (Simonton and Montenach 2013; Simonton et al. 2015; Simonton 2017). To belong to a city meant also to become part of the citizen’s body, to gain social benefits and economic privileges, but also to be subject to its rules. Women could obtain a status of citizens, even if often with some restrictions and, especially in northern Europe, this status was closely linked to apprenticeship and guilds. The size of the city, its location and productive organisation and the role it occupied in the state structure to which it belonged determined not only its economic activities, but also the role and power of the guilds that structured urban crafts. In the early modern age, European cities underwent profound changes: in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, epidemics still claimed many victims from urban ­societies, leaving gaps that had to be filled by immigrants, but, at the end of the period, in some European regions, it was the transformation of

12 

A. Bellavitis

agriculture and the industrial development that led to increasingly important population movements from the countryside to the cities. Working in a city meant tackling the possibilities and risks offered by dynamic and expanding economic situations, and operating in a context that, for better or for worse, attracted young people of both sexes looking for opportunities or simply for the means of survival, but it also meant having to deal with established trade organisations to which women generally had limited access. Doing historical research on women’s work does not only mean looking for female activities in sources that are not very explicit, it also means questioning the gender identity of specific occupations: as we shall see, certain activities that today seem strongly characterised from the point of view of the gender of those who carry them out were much less so in the past. On the other hand, the separation between a male public space and a female private space was much less clear-cut than one might think today. Living and working in the streets, or on the doorsteps of houses that were very often too small, was normal for urban dwellers. Women cooked, and master craftsmen’s wives prepared lunch for workers and apprentices, but many people hardly ever ate at home and bought ready-­ made meals from women who sold them in the streets, as is still the case today in many parts of the world. The fact that many women worked at home and were rarely admitted to the guilds has been an obstacle to historical research which, as we shall see, had to look at sources which apparently have nothing to do with the world of work, such as the archives of the courts, notarial deeds or even the so-called private sources, diaries and correspondence. It would have been difficult to find information on the organisation of the work of the washerwomen of eighteenth-century Rome without legal sources, but the study of civil trials has highlighted the conflicts over the occupation of public space and the use of water among women who earned their living washing other people’s clothes (Lilli 2008). A merchant’s letters to his wife tell us that, when he was travelling, she was in charge of the business, even though she had not been formally invested with this role by a notarial deed giving her power of attorney (Maitte 2016). A craftsman’s will tells us that his wife and daughters had contributed to the weaving business, and that they would continue with it, after the master weaver’s

  Women Have Always Worked 

13

death, on the looms that he had left them as a legacy (Bellavitis 2008). The statement of a witness in a trial explains much about a woman’s life, lived between precarious—today we would say “flexible”—jobs and illegal activities (Shepard 2015b), and the account books of a bourgeois mansion can reveal the unexpected managerial skills of a quiet lady from the countryside (Casella 2015). As we shall see, even more classic and institutional sources, such as guilds statutes and the payrolls of hospitals and monasteries, sometimes speak of female work: of craftswomen struggling to assert their rights, of nurses or teachers who received regular wages, even if lower than their male colleagues’, or even of servants and laundresses employed by religious or secular communities. Even more surprising is the fact that prostitution also had its payroll and that in the archives of the Département des femmes galantes of the Paris Police the contracts of eighteenth-century escort-girls are preserved (Kushner 2015). Historical research has shown the importance of women’s work in urban economies in the early modern age, but also the spread of activities on the verge of legality or beyond it. We are not only talking about prostitution, which was not always illegal, but also about spinners who rounded up their wages by selling the silk thread they stole from the merchants they worked for, about itinerant saleswomen who were not registered in the guilds or even about smuggling and marketing wines and other products whose trade was regulated by municipal or state authorities. As we shall see, it was not always a matter of acting totally illegally, but of inserting oneself in the gaps between rules that were often ambiguous or not very explicit. The answers given by women in courts or the petitions presented to municipal authorities have in many cases highlighted their ability to manipulate rules and interpret traditions, proving their “agency” (Groppi 2002). It was an underground economy that, however, allowed part of the urban population to survive, earning something and buying goods at lower prices than those charged on the official market (Montenach 2013). Paraphrasing the title of an essay by Gianna Pomata (Pomata 1983), we could say that the history of women’s work is a “borders’ issue”: ­borders between internal and external spaces, between legality and illegality, between job identities.

14 

A. Bellavitis

References Ågren, M. (Ed.). (2017). Making a Living, Making a Difference. Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Alessi, G. (2013). Famiglia, famiglie, identità italiana. Storica, 55, 43–79. Barbagli, M. (1984). Sotto lo stesso tetto. Mutamenti della famiglia in Italia dal XV al XX secolo. Bologna: il Mulino. Barker, H. (2006). The Business of Women. Female Enterprise and Urban Development in Northern England (1760–1830). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bellavitis, A. (2008). Famille, genre, transmission à Venise au XVIe siècle. Rome: École Française de Rome. Bellavitis, A. (2018). Lavoro in famiglia, lavoro non remunerato. In R.  Ago (Ed.), Storia del lavoro in Italia. L’età moderna (pp.  175–198). Rome: Castelvecchi. Bellavitis, A., & Zucca Micheletto, B. (Eds.). (2018). Gender, Law and Economic Well-Being in Europe from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth century. North Versus South? London/New York: Routledge. Bellavitis, A., Martini, M., & Sarti, R. (Eds.). (2016). Familles laborieuses. Rémunération, transmission et apprentissage dans les ateliers familiaux de la fin du Moyen Âge à l’époque contemporaine en Europe, dossier in MEFRIM, 128-1. https://mefrim.revues.org/2366 Berg, M. (1992). The First Women Economic Historians. The Economic History Review, 45(2), 308–329. Carmichael, S. G., De Pleijt, A., Van Zanden, J. L., & De Moor, T. (2016). The European Marriage Pattern and Its Measurement. The Journal of Economic History, 76(1), 196–204. Casella, L. (2015). Il confine quotidiano. Scritture di donne in Friuli tra Cinque e Settecento. In S. Chemotti & M. C. La Rocca (Eds.), Il genere nella ricerca storica, Atti del VI Congresso della Società Italiana delle Storiche (Vol. I, pp.  1057–1072). Padova: Il Poligrafo (Padova-Venezia, 12–14 febbraio 2013). Davidoff, L., & Hall, C. (1987). Family Fortunes. Men and Women of the English Middle Class (pp. 1780–1850). Chicago: Chicago University Press. Davidoff, L., & Hall, C. (2014). Family Fortunes. Hommes et femmes de la bourgeoisie anglaise, 1780–1850. Paris: La Dispute (French translation, ed. orig. 1987).

  Women Have Always Worked 

15

Davidson, C. (1982). A Woman’s Work Is Never Done: A History of Housework in the British Isles, 1650–1950. London: Chatto and Windus. De Moor, T., & van Zanden, J. L. (2010). Girl Power: The European Marriage Pattern and Labour Markets in the North Sea Region in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period. The Economic History Review, 63(1), 1–33. Dennison, T., & Ogilvie, S. (2014). Does the European Marriage Pattern Explain Economic Growth? The Journal of Economic History, 74(3), 651–693. Duby, G., & Perrot, M. (Eds.). (1990). La storia delle donne in Occidente. Rome/ Baris: Laterza, 5 vol. First Edition (French edition, Paris: Plon 1991; English edition: Harvard University Press, 1993). Duffy, M. (2011). Making Care Count: A Century of Gender, Race, and Paid Care Work. Piscataway: Rutgers University Press. Fazio, I. (2004). The Family, Honour and Gender in Sicily: Models and New Research. Modern Italy, 9(2), 263–280. Fazio, I. (2005). « Legami forti » e storia della famiglia in Italia. Questioni di metodo, questioni di genere. Storica, 33, 7–39. Fazio, I. (2013). Introduzione. Genere, politica, storia. A 25 anni dalla prima traduzione de Il « genere » : un’utile categoria di analisi storica. In I. Fazio (Ed.), Genere, politica, storia (pp. 7–27). Rome: Viella. Folbre, N. (1991). The Unproductive Housewife: Her Evolution in NineteenthCentury Economic Thought. Signs, 16(3), 463–484. Folbre, N., & Wagman, B. (1993). Counting Housework: New Estimates of Real Product in the United States, 1800–1860. The Journal of Economic History, 53(2), 275–288. Fontaine, L. (2013). Makeshift, Women and Capabilities in Preindustrial European Towns. In D. Simonton & A. Montenach (Eds.), Female Agency in the Urban Economy. Gender in European Towns, 1640–1830 (pp.  56–72). New York/London: Routledge. Froide, A. M. (2017). Silent Partners. Women as Public Investors During Britain’s Financial Revolution, 1690–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gray, M.  W. (2000). Productive Men, Reproductive Women: The Agrarian Household and the Emergence of Separate Spheres During the German Enlightenment. New York: Berghahn Books. Groppi, A. (1990). Un questionario da arricchire. In S. Cavaciocchi (Ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (pp. 143–154). Florence: Le Monnier. Groppi, A. (Ed.). (1996a). Il lavoro delle donne. Rome/Bari: Laterza.

16 

A. Bellavitis

Groppi, A. (1996b). Lavoro e proprietà delle donne in età moderna. In A. Groppi (Ed.), Il lavoro delle donne (pp. 119–163). Rome/Bari: Laterza. Groppi, A. (2002). Une ressource légale pour une pratique illégale. Les juifs et les femmes contre la corporation des tailleurs dans la Rome pontificale (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles). In R. Ago (Ed.), The value of the norm/Il valore delle norme (pp. 137–162). Rome: Biblink. Hill, B. (1989). Women, Work and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Horrell, S., & Humphries, J. (1997). The Origins and Expansion of the Male Breadwinner Family: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Britain. In A. Janssens (Ed.), The Rise and Decline of the Male Breadwinner Family? Special Issue of International Review of Social History (Vol. 42, pp. 25–64). Hufton, O. (1990). Donne, lavoro, famiglia. In G. Duby & M. Perrot (Eds.), La storia delle donne in Occidente. Rome/Bari: Laterza, 3rd vol. Dal Rinascimento all’età moderna, ed. by N. Zemon Davis and A. Farge, (English edition: Women, Work and Family in G. Duby and M. Perrot (eds.) History of Women in the West, vol. III, Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes ed. by N. Zemon Davis and A. Farge, translated by A. Goldhammer, Harvard University Press, 1993). Humphries, J.  (2010). Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Humphries, J., & Sarasúa, C. (2012). Off the Record: Reconstructing Women’s Labor Force Participation in the European Past. Feminist Economics, 18(4), 39–67. Humphries, J., & Weisdorf, J. (2015). The Wages of Women in England, 1260– 1850. The Journal of Economic History, 75(2), 405–447. Kushner, N. (2015). The Business of Being Kept. Elite Prostitution as Work. In D. M. Hafter & N. Kushner (Eds.), Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France (pp. 52–76). Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Lilli, E. (2008). Le lavandaie nella Roma del Settecento. Genesis, VII(1–2), 193–217. Maitte, C. (2016). Le travail invisible dans les familles artisanales (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles). MEFRIM 1. https://me-frim.revues.org/2366 Martini, M., & Bellavitis, A. (Eds.). (2014). Household Economies, Social Norms and Practices of Unpaid Market Work in Europe from the Sixteenth Century to the Present. Special Issue of The History of the Family, 19, 3. Meade, T. A., & Wiesner-Hanks, M. E. (Eds.). (2004). A Companion To Gender History. Malden/Melbourne: Blackwell Publishing.

  Women Have Always Worked 

17

Montenach, A. (Ed.). (2012). Agency: un concept opératoire dans les études de genre? Special Issue of Rives méditerranéennes (Vol. 41). Aixen-Provence: UMR TELEMME. Montenach, A. (2013). Legal Trade and Black Markets. Food Trades in Lyon in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries. In D.  Simonton & A.  Montenach (Eds.), Female Agency in the Urban Economy. Gender in European Towns, 1640–1830 (pp. 17–34). New York/London: Routledge. Montenach, A. (2015). Creating a Space for Themselves on the Urban Market: Survival Strategies and Economic Opportunities for Single Women in French Provincial Towns (Seventeenth–Eighteenth Centuries). In J.  De Groot, I.  Devos, & A.  Schmidt (Eds.), Single Life and the City 1200–1900 (pp. 50–68). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Montenach, A., & Simonton, D. (2013). Introduction. In D.  Simonton & A.  Montenach (Eds.), Female Agency in the Urban Economy. Gender in European Towns, 1640–1830 (pp. 2–14). New York/London: Routledge. Phillips, N. (2006). Women in Business, 1700–1850. Woodbridge: Boydell. Pomata, G. (1983). La storia delle donne: una questione di confine. In G. De Luna, P. Ortoleva, M. Revelli, & N. Tranfaglia (Eds.), Il mondo contemporaneo, vol. 10, Gli strumenti della ricerca, t. 2 (pp. 1434–1464). Florence: La Nuova Italia. Rublack, U. (1999). The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sarti, R. (2006). Nubili e celibi tra scelta e costrizione. I percorsi di Clio (Europa occidentale, secoli XVI–XX). In M.  Lanzinger & R.  Sarti (Eds.), Nubili e celibi tra scelta e costrizione (secoli XVI–XX) (pp. 145–318). Udine: Forum. Scott, J. (1990). La donna lavoratrice nel XIX secolo. In G. Duby & M. Perrot (Eds.), La storia delle donne in Occidente. Rome/Bari: Laterza, 4th vol. L’Ottocento, ed. by G. Fraisse and M. Perrot (English edition: The Woman Worker, in G. Duby and M. Perrot (Eds.), History of Women in the West, vol. IV, Emerging Feminism from Revolution to World War, ed. by G. Fraisse and M. Perrot, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Harvard University Press, 1993. Shepard, A. (2015a). Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, and the Social Order in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shepard, A. (2015b). Crediting Women in the Early Modern English Economy. History Workshop Journal, 79, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbv002. Simonton, D. (Ed.). (2017). The Routledge History Handbook of Gender and the Urban Experience. New York/London: Routledge.

18 

A. Bellavitis

Simonton, D., & Montenach, A. (Eds.). (2013). Female Agency in the Urban Economy. Gender in European Towns, 1640–1830. New  York/London: Routledge. Simonton, D., Kaartinen, M., & Montenach, A. (Eds.). (2015). Luxury and Gender in European Towns, 1700–1914. New York/London: Routledge. Tilly, L., & Scott, J. (1978). Women, Work and Family. New York: Holt/Rinehart and Winston. Tilly, L., & Scott, J. (1987). Women, Work and Family. London: Routledge. van Nederveen Meerkerk, E. (2010). Market Wage or Discrimination? The Remuneration of Male and Female Wool Spinners in the SeventeenthCentury Dutch Republic. Economic History Review, 63(1), 165–186. Viazzo, P. P. (2003). What’s So Special About the Mediterranean? Continuity and Change, 18, 111–137.

2 The Gender of Work

Archives and libraries have been scoured for evidence, documents and data on the work of women in the past, on the assumption that economic independence was the primary condition, necessary though not sufficient, to have control over one’s own existence. At the same time, historical research has focused on activities carried out in the family, where the vital contribution of women and children is more difficult to document, even in professions that today we perceive as typically feminine. We can, for example, mention the families of launderers (lavandari), documented in Bologna in the eighteenth century, in which the head of the family was a male master launderer, who organised the work of his wife, children and possibly even other relatives or servants (Palazzi 1990). But to what extent was work a source of identity, independence and pride for women in the past? This question has been central to a great deal of recent research, which has endeavoured and often, as we shall see, managed to overcome the image of women in the workplace exclusively as resources to be exploited (Hafter and Kushner 2015). Working was rarely a choice, an opportunity for emancipation or a career; more often than not, it was effort, suffering and obligation in a world where, for much of the early modern age, the social ideal was that of the rentier: the head of his family and servants, who lived on income © The Author(s) 2018 A. Bellavitis, Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96541-3_2

19

20 

A. Bellavitis

and did not engage in any “mechanical arts” (Hofmeester and Moll-­ Murata 2011; Arnoux 2012; Lis and Soly 2012). And yet, almost everybody worked, men and women, and for their entire lives, starting out as children, since very few went to school, and stopping only when they died, as there was no pension system as such. In eighteenth-century Madrid, María de Oñoro, aged 71, worked as laundress to pay the rent of the room where she lived and Rosa Parra, aged 89, worked as a fruit seller: “for poor workers, life and activity are practically the same” (López Barahona 2016: 42). Charity systems, after all, did not allow those who were taken in by hospices and orphanages to remain idle, but expected them to contribute to their living costs by working. The most widespread female occupations, such as spinning, did not require much physical strength and could therefore be carried out up to a very old age. They could also be carried out by men, and, in hospices, men often engaged in these kinds of occupations to support themselves. However, the decline in eyesight as a consequence of old age made the abandonment of such activities inevitable at some point (Groppi 2010, 2011). Beyond mere subsistence, what independence and what bargaining power with fathers, husbands or masters could the jobs that women could and had to do in the past provide? Some occupations were considered more suitable for women, and there are some tasks that can only be performed by females. Nevertheless, even breastfeeding other women’s children, an intrinsically feminine occupation, was sometimes managed by men and with men. In Renaissance Florence, the balii, or husbands of the wet nurses, would negotiate with the newborns’ fathers the price of their wives’ services (Klapisch-Zuber 1980). However, the very notion of ‘women’s’ and ‘men’s’ jobs was neither obvious nor fixed, in much the same way as it happens nowadays. For example, the spread of rural ‘proto-industry’ in the early modern age involved both men and women and, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the German humanist Sebastian Franck observed, with a mix of surprise and disappointment, in the countryside around Ulm and Augsburg, some men and boys, “vigorous, active and strong”, busy spinning wool and chatting, “as if they were women”. A wonderful example of a reversal of gender roles and proof that, whenever there was need or

  The Gender of Work 

21

opportunity, almost no job had a fixed and permanent gender identity (Wiesner 1996). In eighteenth-century England, the making of clothes was no longer a monopoly of men and with the emergence of mantua-­ making part of the trade passed into the hands of women (Hill 2001). Similarly, as we shall see, silk weaving, an activity mainly performed by men in the Middle Ages and at the beginning of the early modern period, became a female activity in eighteenth-century Italy, during a contraction of the market which made it necessary to save on production costs (Groppi 1996). Technological advances have always had consequences for gender roles in the workplace and, in the industrial age, the mechanisation of some production processes prompted the entry of poorly skilled and, therefore, lower-paid women into the factories. On the contrary, at the beginning of the early modern period, in some European regions, the use of mechanical looms in the manufacture of wool stockings pushed women out of an occupation that, until then, had been carried out exclusively by women. The paradox is that, at the end of the sixteenth century, in some cities of the German Empire, having succeeded in excluding women from the mechanised production of stockings, master knitters asked the city authorities to exclude women from the production of hand-knitted stockings, alleging that even that kind of production was too skilled. Yet, in the past, it had always been carried out by women (Wiesner 1996). Occupations with a strong public role were hardly ever accessible to women. It is certainly no coincidence that a ‘public man’ was, and still is, a famous and socially recognisable male individual, whereas ‘public woman’ was used in the past, but fortunately no longer, to indicate a prostitute. In the religious processions that marked the urban rituals in Sicilian cities, in the early modern age, the men would parade according to ordered hierarchies that reflected their belonging to the various social bodies, whereas the women were a random, disorganised and sometimes even irreverent presence, according to a kind of ritual reversal of traditional behavioural norms (Laudani 1996). In German cities, men had a public role in guilds’ processions, whereas women remained on the sidelines. However, the ceremonies organised by the associations of typically female occupations, such as midwives, were experienced by members as important opportunities to create group cohesion and a professional

22 

A. Bellavitis

identity, according to what the Strasbourg midwives declared in 1584 (Wiesner 1996). Women were present in many sectors which today, in Europe at least, may seem strictly male. In Besançon, in 1601, a number of women worked alongside men to rebuild the square and they were “charged with digging up all the soil in the cemetery”, extracting from the ground “the bones, and carrying them to the area of the cemetery behind the aforementioned church”. Other women were employed in the construction of fortifications for which “they carried the soil to build the necessary footings” and in 1615 a number of girls were paid for the “transportation of stones in front of the sluices in order to raise them”. Outside the urban environment, we find women in mines or saltworks doing manual labour, but also performing roles requiring the organisation of the work of others. These roles, called “offices”, could be passed on to other women in the family (Delsalle 2008). Finally, the women that accompanied the armies in military campaigns were not just prostitutes or romantic adventurers dressed as men, but food or wine purveyors and laundresses employed by military commands for day-to-day services, and also soldiers’ wives. With their children, they followed their husbands because, if they stayed at home, they would not have been able to support themselves. In the eighteenth century, the Prussian army allowed five women, along with their children, for every hundred soldiers. If a soldier died, his widow was allowed to marry another, to ensure protection and support for herself and her children (Potter 2006). The only activities ascribed to women in Tommaso Garzoni’s ambitious book, The Universal Assembly of All the Professions in the World (1585), are (according to the book’s classifications): “soothsayers, witches, court ladies, agents for maids, prostitutes, panders, wool spinners, spinners, laundresses, midwives, dry- or wet-nurses”. In some instances, women reappear in chapters devoted to individual jobs, so, about embroiderers, for example, Garzoni writes: “this job has more to do with decoration than comfort, and it is more for women than for men” (Cerchi and Collina 1996: 790–791). The observation is interesting also because, until the beginning of the sixteenth century, the work of embroidery was in the hands of men, and working with the needle did not endanger their social reputation. On the contrary, embroiderers were a highly appreciated

  The Gender of Work 

23

category of workers who enjoyed a status not unlike painters, with whom they often divided shops and orders (Plebani 2016). In his chapter on actors, Garzoni lavished praise on the great Italian actresses of his time, such as the ‘pretty Isabella’, the ‘erudite Vicenza’ or the ‘divine Vittoria’. When discussing female activities, Garzoni had no qualms only for laundresses and spinners, both noble and necessary crafts, whereas he described all others in very unflattering terms. Beyond the misogyny and obvious snobbery of such criticism, articulated by a cleric, the activities carried by women in early modern European cities were far more numerous, even though, perhaps, there were never any female “teachers of hieroglyphs”, or “street thugs” (Cerchi and Collina 1996: 1182). Crafts, domestic service and retail trade were the most frequent female occupations in urban contexts. The products that some cities specialised in determined what opportunities for work existed for women. That is why in Geneva, for example, between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, a third of people employed in the manufacture of watches were women (Mottu-Weber 1990). In Florence, where textile production was one of the main activities, in 1604 women represented 62 per cent of weavers and around 40 per cent of all wool workers and, in 1662–1663, 38 per cent of workers in the wool sector and 84 per cent of silk workers (Brown and Goodman 1980). Many women worked as employees of municipal and religious institutions. For example, in Nuremberg, women could be granted a municipal licence allowing them to practise as estimators for post-mortem inventories; a very important activity, since every death required an inventory, regardless of the social or marital status of the deceased, and multiple skills were needed to estimate the value of objects, clothes, luxury goods and work tools (Wiesner 1981). To deal with immovable goods, however, the services of male experts were called upon, adhering to a significant division of roles, which is sometimes also found in succession laws, according to which women inherited the movable assets and men the immovable (Bellavitis 2008). In Rotterdam, in 1680, about 16 per cent of the lower level offices were held by women and, in 1727, their share had increased to a third. They worked in almost all sectors of government activity: general administration, public order and safety, public works, trade and transport,

24 

A. Bellavitis

health and social care, education and the church. They were also involved in tax or toll collection: it is, for example, the case of Maria Jacobs Koele in Gouda, who inherited the toll collection lease from her late husband in 1713 and passed it on to her daughter. Aeltgen Hendricx from Leiden took over the office of postman from her late husband and made a living as a messenger to Antwerp and travelled there with colleagues from other towns. The employment opportunities of women in local public offices expanded in Dutch cities, during the early modern period (van der Heijden and Schmidt 2010). In some cases, the process of “professionalization” that characterised the eighteenth century led to the exclusion of women from labour markets, but this was not the case in those sectors in which qualities that were considered as typically “female”, like caregiving and nurturing, were important, as it was the case in orphanages (Schmidt 2008). In the city of A Coruña in Galicia, in 1753, the Real Audiencia paid a female road sweeper an annual salary of 365 reales and two female water suppliers, who supplied the army, a salary of 500 reales; in Santiago de Compostela, the prison service would occasionally recruit a pedidera de limonsas, that is a woman asking for alms for prisoners (Rey Castelao 2010). In Seville, in 1587, the San Ermenegildo Hospital paid a salary to three women working as cooks and laundresses, assisted by six girls, who received 9000 maravedis as salaries and 20,000 as dowries (Perry 1990). In some public or institutional occupations, in the early modern period, there were restrictions linked to age and marital status: in England, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, court ladiesin-waiting had to be unmarried and were dismissed if they became pregnant; head nurses in charity hospitals, on the other hand, had to be either married or widows (Mendelson and Crawford 1998). In the Venetian Casa delle Zitelle, a charitable institution for young women at risk of falling into prostitution, a candidate for the position of governess, called Madre, had to be at least 40  years old and would ideally have already spent at least 12 years working for the house. “Thus it appears that working for the Casa delle Zitelle could be something of a career for a woman” (Chojnacka 1998: 75). In female monasteries, too, working and producing goods for sale could be indispensable, given the chronic liquidity crisis that characterised

  The Gender of Work 

25

these institutions in the early modern age. Such “secular” activities were subject to strict controls, at least in theory, as shown in the records of a bishop’s visit to a Venetian monastery in 1521: Great upheaval, and the origin of many evils, arises because many nuns would not submit to working in the communal workshop; therefore we order that all nuns submit to working in the communal workshop, and never in their own cells. […] The Mother Abbess is to nominate some nuns to read in turn from some spiritual book in the workshop, and nuns must sing psalms together as they do in well-ruled monasteries. […] They must produce only things approved by their Mother Superiors, useful to the monastery and for honest and respectable people who do not cause scandal. (Campagnol 2012: 121–122)

The problem was that the nuns engaged in sewing items that were too precious and refined, producing lace and embroidery that, in actual fact, they used for themselves, in clear violation of the rules on the poverty of their garments, or donated to their numerous visitors rather than to the religious or civil authorities which supported the monastery, or even sold for personal profit and not to supplement the resources of their community. Thus, for example, in 1571, the prioress of the convent of San Giuseppe in Castello denounced one of her sisters, Deodata, to the Provveditori sopra Monasteri (Superintendents of Monasteries). Sister Deodata was able to work “miraculously with pearls and jewels”, but also had the terrible habit of giving away handkerchiefs, shirts and hats “resplendent with gold and silver lace” to some friars from the Augustinian convent of Sant’Antonio and San Salvador. For this reason, in the 13 years spent at the convent, “she never worked for the monastery, and everything that she earned she used for herself, and spent everything” (Campagnol 2012: 118, 124–125). Such activities with the outside world were far from encouraged by the religious authorities, who rather deplored the fact that nuns devoted themselves too much to occupations that had nothing to do with prayer. At times, they even came into conflict with the guilds, as can be gleaned from a declaration submitted in 1529 to the Venetian Senate by some silk weavers, who complained about the competition from the city’s monasteries in the preparation of warps (Molà 2000: 424).

26 

A. Bellavitis

In the wage books of the Arsenal, one of the main Venetian industries, there were, in the mid-seventeenth century, between 25 and 40 velere (female sailmakers). For a daily wage between 14 and 16 soldi, they stitched sails under the guidance of a mistress who was paid two soldi more. Contemporary accounts of foreign travellers, however, spoke of dozens of women busy repairing sails. It was a flexible work that, when necessary, the mistresses could subcontract. A dozen more women were employed to prepare the oakum for caulking the ships and were paid a higher wage, up to 30 soldi per day. In the calli and campi around the Arsenal, we find women heads of families with less predictable jobs: a marangona (female carpenter), a remera (female oar maker), three favre (female blacksmiths), a cestera (female basket maker), two barilere (female coopers) and half a dozen marinere (female sailors) (Davis 1991). They were  maybe widows defined by their husbands’ professions; however, incidentally, it would be difficult in modern Italian to use feminine nouns to describe these professions: marinaia (a female sailor) is perhaps the only term recently adopted by modern Italian. Old-regimes populations, just like today’s, were extremely mobile. Migration is by no means an exclusively contemporary phenomenon and its driving forces remain the same: to escape poverty, war, pestilence and religious persecution. Economic migration, whether permanent or temporary, in search of work, contrary to what we might expect, was widespread even for women (Corsi 1999; Sharpe 2001; Arru et  al. 2008). However, as we shall see, there was also forced migration: in fact, even in the early modern period, female and male slaves were a significant presence in some European cities (Angiolini 1996). Migration in search of work could also have a religious dimension, such as in the case of those girls from Calvinist Geneva who, in the seventeenth century, migrated to Lyon and found work and assistance, after converting to Catholicism, thanks to the Congregation De Propaganda Fide (Martinat 2009). Travelling was certainly much less safe for women than men, and women without financial resources who moved with no contacts at their destination and no employment contract, in addition to exposing themselves to many risks, were regularly accused of vagrancy and prostitution. In the sixteenth century, in some areas of the Holy Roman Empire, unmarried women were not allowed to move to another city if they did

  The Gender of Work 

27

not have a domestic service contract, and any hotelier hosting women travelling alone could be fined. Gradually, the limitations imposed on working-class women who travelled in search of work were extended to the daughters of citizens, who were forbidden, at least formally, from living independently or, in their words, from “having their own smoke”, that is their own hearth, and from “earning their own bread” (Wiesner 1999). In seventeenth-century England, labouring single women were carefully watched and when poor women migrants arrived in a town they were rigorously removed: “parish officers seem to have put more effort into the disposal of single women than into any other of their activities” (Hill 2001: 123). In eighteenth-century Spain, seasonal migration to Castille or Andalucia for farm work involved thousands of men and women. However, in 1736, the municipal authorities forbade unmarried women, even when accompanied by relatives, and married women unaccompanied by their husbands, to emigrate. The following decades saw a series of measures imposed against women who emigrated dressed as men, branding them as “perverse” for abandoning home and “spinning, weaving and sewing, and any occupation that forces them to stay at home” (Sarasúa 2001). The search for a better life, however, then like today, pushed many young women to leave their homes and look for work as artisans, wet nurses or maids. In the cities, they were often taken in by relatives or people from their villages. Their family and geographic networks can be reconstructed thanks to notary deeds, employment or apprenticeship contracts, and even wills, where people coming from the same place would often appear as guarantors, witnesses and recipients of legacies (Bellavitis 2008; Canepari 2014). These brief comments show quite eloquently the variety of female occupations in early modern urban Europe. The following pages will mostly focus on cities, large and small, and on the many jobs that women performed there, inside and outside their homes: crafts, trade, domestic services and occupations linked to the female body, their own and other people’s, from midwifery to prostitution. These were activities organised and regulated by rules and statutes, but also clandestine and unauthorised ones, at the limit of or beyond legality, performed by women of all ages and marital status, in urban contexts of different sizes, from the big capitals to the smaller cities, from port cities engaged in international trade to

28 

A. Bellavitis

small rural centres. We shall not deal with the time and rhythm of agricultural work, although we must not forget that some agricultural production took place in the cities and that many women were employed in the cultivation of vegetable gardens or in keeping farmyard animals, for example in monasteries and in religious and charitable institutions (Ramiro Moya 2012). We cannot, after all, avoid investigating the relationship between the countryside and the city, for example, in terms of immigration and mobility, or of ‘proto-industrial’ activities where the manufacturing work of women living in villages or agricultural areas depended on urban markets, not only on a regional but also on an international scale.

References Angiolini, F. (1996). Schiave. In A.  Groppi (Ed.), Il lavoro delle donne (pp. 92–115). Rome: Viella. Arnoux, M. (2012). Le temps des laboureurs. Travail, ordre social et croissance en Europe, XIe–XVe siècle. Paris: Albin Michel. Arru, A., Caglioti, D. L., & Ramella, F. (Eds.). (2008). Donne e uomini migranti. Storie e geografie tra breve e lunga distanza. Roma: Donzelli. Bellavitis, A. (2008). Famille, genre, transmission à Venise au XVIe siècle. Rome: École Française de Rome. Brown, J. C., & Goodman, J. (1980). Women and Industry in Florence. The Journal of Economic History, 40(1), 73–80. Campagnol, I. (2012). Penelope in clausura. Lavori femminili nei monasteri veneziani della prima età moderna. Archivio Veneto, 3, 117–126. Canepari, E. (2014). «In My Home Town I Have…». Migrant Women and Multi-local Ties (Rome, 17th–18th Centuries). Genesis, XIII(1), 11–30. Cerchi, C., & Collina, B. (Eds.). (1996). Tommaso Garzoni, La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo. Torino: Einaudi. Chojnacka, M. (1998). Women, Charity and Community in Early Modern Venice: The Casa delle Zitelle. Renaissance Quarterly, 51, 68–91. Corsi, D. (Ed.). (1999). Altrove. Viaggi di donne dall’Antichità al Novecento. Rome: Viella. Davis, R. C. (1991). Shipbuilders of the Venetian Arsenal. Workers and Workplace in the Preindustrial City. Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

  The Gender of Work 

29

Delsalle, P. (2008). Il lavoro delle donne nella Franca Contea ai tempi degli Asburgo (1493–1678). Genesis, VII(1–2), 219–232. Groppi, A. (1996). Lavoro e proprietà delle donne in età moderna. In A. Groppi (Ed.), Il lavoro delle donne (pp. 119–163). Rome/Bari: Laterza. Groppi, A. (2010). Il welfare prima del welfare. Assistenza alla vecchiaia e solidarietà tra generazioni a Roma in età moderna. Rome: Viella. Groppi, A. (2011). «Le devoir de travailler jusqu’à la fin de ses jours». Le travail des personnes âgées dans la Rome pontificale (XVII–XIX siècles). MEFRIM, 123(1), 25–32. Hafter, D. M., & Kushner, N. (Eds.). (2015). Women and Work in EighteenthCentury France. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Hill, B. (2001). Women Alone. Spinsters in England, 1660–1850. New Haven/ London: Yale University Press. Hofmeester, K., & Moll-Murata, C. (Eds.). (2011). The Joy and Pain of Work: Global Attitudes and Valuations, 1500–1650. Special Issue of International Review of Social History, 56, 1–23. Klapisch-Zuber, C. (1980). Genitori naturali e genitori da latte nella Firenze del Quattrocento. Quaderni Storici, 44(XV(2)), 543–563. Laudani, S. (1996). Mestieri di donne, mestieri di uomini: le corporazioni in età moderna. In A.  Groppi (Ed.), Il lavoro delle donne (pp.  183–205). Rome/ Bari: Laterza. Lis, C., & Soly, H. (2012). Worthy Efforts: Attitudes to Work and Workers in Preindustrial Europe. Leiden/Boston: Brill. López Barahona, V. (2016). Las trabajadoras en la sociedad madrileña del siglo XVIII. Madrid: ACCI. Martinat, M. (2009). Conversions religieuses et mobilité sociale. Quelques cas entre Genève et Lyon au XVIIe siècle. In A. Bellavitis, L. Croq, & M. Martinat (Eds.), Mobilité et transmission dans les sociétés de l’Europe moderne (pp. 139–158). Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Mendelson, S., & Crawford, P. (1998). Women in Early Modern England 1550–1720. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Molà, L. (2000). Le donne nell’industria serica veneziana del Rinascimento. In L. Molà, R. C. Mueller, & C. Zanier (Eds.), La seta in Italia dal Medioevo al Seicento. Dal baco al drappo (pp. 423–459). Venice: Marsilio. Mottu-Weber, L. (1990). L’évolution des activités professionnelles des femmes à Genève du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle. In S.  Cavaciocchi (Ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (pp. 345–357). Florence: Le Monnier.

30 

A. Bellavitis

Palazzi, M. (1990). “Tessitrici, serve, treccole”. Donne, lavoro e famiglia a Bologna nel Settecento. In S. Cavaciocchi (Ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (pp. 359–376). Florence: Le Monnier. Perry, E. (1990). Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Plebani, T. (2016). Dal lavoro alla disciplina Precettistica e libri di ricami. In H. Sanson & F. Lucioli (Eds.), Conduct Literature for and About Women in Italy, 1470–1900 (pp. 303–323). Paris: Garnier. Potter, J. (2006). Valliant Heroines or Pacific Ladies? Women in War and Peace. In D. Simonton (Ed.), The Routledge History of Women in Europe Since 1700 (pp. 259–298). London/New York: Routledge. Ramiro Moya, F. (2012). Mujeres y trabajo en la Zaragoza del siglo XVIII. Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza. Rey Castelao, O. (2010). Trabajando a cubierto. Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, 40(2). http://mcv.revues.org/3575. Sarasúa, C. (2001). Leaving Home to Help Family? Male and Female Temporary Migrants in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Spain. In P. Sharpe (Ed.), Women, Gender and Labour Migration (pp.  29–59). Abingdon/New York: Routledge. Schmidt, A. (2008). Managing a Large Household. The Gender Division of Work in Orphanages in Dutch Towns in the Early Modern Period, 1580– 1800. History of the Family, 13, 42–57. Sharpe, P. (Ed.). (2001). Women, Gender and Labour Migration. Abingdon/New York: Routledge. van der Heijden, M., & Schmidt, A. (2010). Public Services and Women’s Work in Early Modern Dutch Towns. Journal of Urban History, 36(3), 368–385. Wiesner, M. E. (1981). Paltry Peddlers or Essential Merchants? Women in the Distributive Trades in Early Modern Nuremberg. The Sixteenth Century Journal, XII(2), 3–13. Wiesner, M. E. (1996). Gender and the Worlds of Work. In B. Scribner (Ed.), Germany. A New Social and Economic History, vol. 1, 1450–1630 (pp. 209–232). London/New York/Sidney/Auckland: Arnold. Wiesner, M.  E. (1999). Having Her Own Smoke. Employment and Independence for Singlewomen in Germany, 1400–1750. In J. M. Bennett & A.  M. Froide (Eds.), Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800 (pp. 192–216). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

3 Working Daughters, Wives, Mothers, Sisters, Widows

As women’s and gender historians, the first problem we have to face is that of sources. In quantitative sources, particularly fiscal sources and censuses, women’s work was underrepresented. Unlike men, women were almost always defined according to their roles in their families: as daughters, wives and widows, rather than in relation to the activities they performed. This was particularly true of married women. The specific issue of women’s working identities can be added to the more general observation that in the past just as today (and increasingly so in the context of the economic crisis and the spread of the so-called flexible working conditions, which actually hide a growing casualisation) many people, men and women, had various relatively unskilled jobs over their lifetime and a professional identity was a privilege relatively few people in society possessed (Bellavitis and Piccone Stella 2008). We may feel that this was especially true of women, who even more rarely had training specific to a profession or educational qualifications, although it should not be forgotten that, in the context of manual labour or agricultural work, as many men as women made their living from more than one job or from irregular work. The paradox, highlighted by the most recent research, is that, even when they did not have a regular occupation and did not have what we would today term a “permanent post”, men were more often described © The Author(s) 2018 A. Bellavitis, Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96541-3_3

31

32 

A. Bellavitis

in fiscal and quantitative sources on the population by a precise professional identity, which has contributed to further distortion of the data available to historians (Humphries and Sarasúa 2012). Women’s activities were often defined in terms of ‘doing’ rather than ‘being’. For example, in the 1805 Venetian population registers, compiled during Austrian domination, some women’s occupations are entered next to their names: fustagnera (fustian-weaver), revendigola (saleswoman) and impiraressa (threader of glass beads), but there are also sentences like “she makes shoes”, “she makes beads”, “works with linen”, “works in fashion”, “spins wool” or even “she picks up paper from the streets” (Bellavitis et al. 1990). The tendency not to define work as the intrinsic identity of a person, but as an accessory and transient fact, can be recognised in the definitions that women gave of themselves. In testimonies made to Roman courts in the nineteenth century, when asked to state their working identity, the women would say “I work as a” seamstress, servant and so on, whereas the men would declare they “were” tailors, shoemakers and so on (Pelaja 1990). Indeed, this subtle yet profound distinction also corresponded to roles that were effectively diversified within jobs that could be similar in nature: being the head of a dressmaking workshop was different from being a seamstress at home, even if it is obvious that mobility and job insecurity also characterised a large part of the male population and that not all women performed casualised and underpaid work. However, we cannot fail to notice that women’s tendency to construct their own identities not through their work, but through their families, has endured for a very long time, and is still very familiar to us today. Censual and fiscal sources usually only recorded the occupation of heads of households, so this information is available when women were the heads of their households, be they widows or spinsters. In early modern German cities, between a fifth and a quarter of fiscal households had a woman as their head, but it is not always obvious whether these women were spinsters or widows. In Stuttgart, a tax imposed in 1545 to finance the war against the Ottoman Empire (Türkensteuer) distinguished 11 per cent of widows as heads of households from 3.5 per cent of women as heads of households, whom can be assumed to have been spinsters. Similar results can be obtained from fiscal sources from Frankfurt and Augsburg between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the

  Working Daughters, Wives, Mothers, Sisters, Widows 

33

seventeenth centuries. If we consider that a girl’s marital age was between 21 and 25 in the cities and between 25 and 28 in the villages, it can be reasonably assumed that many of the spinsters at the head of their families would not remain unmarried indefinitely (Wiesner 1999). In the cities of Burgundy and Brittany, in the seventeenth century, between 10 and 20 per cent of heads of households were women: they were generally craftswomen, but most were wealthy widows (Collins 1989). In Venice, between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries, 4924 men were heads of households compared to 935 women, of which 84 per cent (= 788) were widows; 137 prostitutes were heads of households out of a total of 213 (Chojnacka 2001: 16, 23). In the small Portuguese city of Vila do Conde, in the same period, fiscal records show an unusually high percentage of women as heads of households: 115 out of a total of 639 fiscal households in 1568 and 300 out of 697 in 1643. Some had means, but the majority were included in the lower band of taxpayers. Although their occupations are known in only 21 per cent of cases in 1568 and 7.3 per cent in 1643, the explanation for the high percentage of female heads of households can be found in the occupational structure of the city, characterised by occupations linked to the sea, such as sailors, fishermen and helmsmen, that took the men far away from home. The percentage in nearby Porto, where the occupational structure was more complex and not exclusively dependent on maritime activities, was far lower: 9 per cent of women were heads of households in 1698, compared to 43 per cent in 1634 in Vila do Conde. In Porto, the occupations of these women were recorded in 40 per cent of cases and were mostly trade and textile crafts (Polónia 2009). In Warsaw, in 1781, 38 per cent of female heads of households were without resources and a further 38 per cent were employed in a domestic service; in Krakow, however, 22 per cent worked in retail trade and 18 per cent in wholesale trade, figures that, in the capital, fell to 11 and 6 per cent, respectively (Kuklo 2005). Some censuses recorded the activities of all family members. In Turin’s case, research on a specific profession, hairdressers, has shown that the 1705 population census shows just four women, all widows, as working in this trade, whilst none of the female family members of the 63 master hairdressers working in the city was recorded as such. A woman’s

34 

A. Bellavitis

occupation was never recorded when she worked in the family workshop, whereas it was more frequently recorded when women were the paid workers of a master craftsman. This generally occurred in the textile industry, so this is the only sector where the presence of women is, at least partially, quantifiable, whereas the sources say nothing about the presence of women in more ‘masculine’ sectors, where they would work side by side with their fathers and husbands. However, according to the 1690 Turin census of French nationals present in the city, almost all women (94 out of 104) had an occupation: about half of them (46) were married and often had children. The explanation for this discrepancy is not that French women were more active than their Turinese counterparts, but lies in the way in which two sources, theoretically comparable, were compiled (Cavallo 2006). A very interesting census, even though it only covers some of the city’s parishes, is the one carried out in Bologna in 1796. It recorded all family members’ occupations and was undertaken to “find a useful occupation and honest income for those who need it and sometimes cannot find it”. The comparison between occupation and role in the family reveals that 68.3 per cent of female heads of households (101), 63 per cent of wives (522) and 52.7 per cent of daughters (163) carried out paid work. A further 38.9 per cent of female live-in relatives (129) and 62.7 per cent of female non-related cohabitants can be added to these figures. Since the last figure does not include the 132 women in domestic service, also duly recorded, we can infer that they were women, often elderly and unable to support themselves who accepted accommodation in exchange for some service. In general, a greater presence in the labour market was linked to precarious conditions, as is also shown by the fact that most female workers were immigrants. All ages are represented, from 56.1 per cent of girls under the age of 20 (out of a total of women aged over 11) to 69.1 per cent of those aged between 41 and 50. The most common occupation was home spinning (166 women, or 23.6 per cent), followed by domestic work (132, or 18.8 per cent); the remaining women were occupied in all aspects of the textile industry and, to a lesser extent, in trade (Palazzi 1990). Even censuses charged with recording all family members’ occupations can, however, turn out to be incomplete. The 1802 Napoleonic census of

  Working Daughters, Wives, Mothers, Sisters, Widows 

35

Turin reveals that 33.3 per cent of women over the age of 15 worked in agriculture, crafts and trade, but only 21.7 per cent of married women declared an occupation, compared to 55.7 per cent of unmarried women over the age of 25 and 48.6 per cent of widows. Out of the women at the head of their families, 53.5 per cent declared a working activity (68 per cent of these were widows), whereas only 23.2 per cent of the other women (daughters, cohabitants, relatives etc.) had an occupation. Comparing this source with the late eighteenth-century registers of the Ospedale della Carità, we realise that the same women who were recorded as non-active in the census appeared among the craftswomen assisted by the hospital; however, as they were married women, the compilers of the census had considered them unemployed and dependent on their husbands (Zucca Micheletto 2008, 2013). In the case of the small Dutch city of Tilburg, the occupations of married women were similarly underestimated by the 1810 census which, as in Turin’s case, was also supposed to record the occupations of all family members. The figure of 58 per cent of wives being non-active is certainly excessive and a more detailed analysis reveals that the occupations of married women have been recorded differently in the various economic sectors. All the wives of hoteliers and metal craftsmen, nearly all the wives of merchants (97 per cent), of craftsmen working in the clothing (94 per cent) and food sectors (94 per cent), of glassworkers (86 per cent) and of farmers (89 per cent) were recorded as not having an occupation. This was in contrast to the overwhelming majority of the wives of textile craftsmen, where the percentages of non-active women were 4 per cent for wool-combers, 11 per cent for spinners, 16.7 per cent for wool carders and up to 32 per cent for weavers. Overall, 94 per cent of married women whose occupation is known about were spinners. As in Turin, the wives who worked in their husbands’ businesses do not appear in the census with their own occupations (Schmidt and van Nederveen Meerkerk 2012; van Nederveen Meerkerk 2008a, b). A married woman’s identity was subsumed within that of her husband and head of the family. This extended beyond working identities: in German language sources, die Schmidin can mean both a woman working as a blacksmith and the wife or widow of a blacksmith, but can also indicate a woman’s or her husband’s surname (Wiesner 1996). With

36 

A. Bellavitis

regard to Portugal, it has been suggested that, in early modern censual sources, the definition “wife of ”, in the case of families of craftsmen, was always synonymous with the craft she performed alongside her husband (Abreu-Ferreira 2002). The study of marriage contracts has produced some interesting results: in eighteenth-century Lyon, the percentage of brides of silk workers whose name was accompanied by an indication of an occupation increased regularly. This was not because the women of Lyon had become more active or independent over the century, but because the registration criteria had changed. In the years 1728–1730, only 5 per cent of brides had an occupation, but the majority declared that their dowries were the fruits of their own labour and, towards the end of the century (1786–1789), the percentage of young brides whose name was accompanied, in their marriage contracts, by the indication of an occupation, reached 70 per cent (Garden 1970: 215). The identification of an occupation would more frequently follow the name of a widow rather than that of a wife and, if in a sixteenth-century Venetian notarial act we find a “Pasqualina, dyer, widow of Master Zuanne, dyer from Bergamo”, we can be almost certain that Pasqualina had worked as a ‘dyer’ with her husband and that she had continued to do so after being widowed.1 In seventeenth-century Gouda, there were women making brooms, buttons, foot-warmers, baskets, knives, wigs, shoes and clothing, but also women working as carpenters, woodworkers, wavers, rope-makers, fuse spinners, silversmiths, armourers, barbers and barge captains, most of them were widows continuing the craft or trade of their husbands (Schmidt 2009). By the same token, Josefa Laguerri, described as a maestra albañila or master female mason in the 1723 Zaragoza census, was the widow of a mason who had continued to manage his workshop (Ramiro Moya 2012). In a 1783 list of barbershops in Rome 13 women appear as owners and all of them are widows (Groppi 2002). More unusual sources have yielded interesting results related to the eighteenth century in England. In London, female shop owners signed contracts with insurance companies: between 1775 and 1787, 11.5 per cent of the contracts entered into by Royal Exchange Insurance had been signed by women who owned their own shops and who often entered into partnerships with other women, with whom they also occasionally

  Working Daughters, Wives, Mothers, Sisters, Widows 

37

shared a home. The majority were milliners or dressmakers (trades in which women represented 60.6 per cent and 57.9 per cent, respectively of the total), but there were also owners of shops selling households goods (18.5 per cent), pawnbrokers (16.1 per cent), haberdashers (12.3 per cent), tea merchants (11.4 per cent), merchants of pottery, glass and chinaware (11.8 per cent) or fur goods (10.7 per cent). This list could continue, but we will just quote a genuinely singular source, the Manchester Directory: a list of the city’s companies published in 1722 by Elisabeth Raffald, a Manchester businesswoman, chef, owner of a pastry shop and pub, as well as the author of one of the best cookery books of the century, and mother to no less than 16 children. Ninety-four women appear in the directory, or 6 per cent of the total number of traders, half of whom were widows. Most worked in the textile and food industries, but there were also three teachers and two midwives. Elisabeth Raffald did not include her own grocer’s shop in the directory but recorded it instead under her husband’s name, which probably means that only women trading independently would appear: widows, single women and those married women who carried on their own business, separate from those of their husband (Hunt 1996). A recent research project at the University of Uppsala proposed to “make verbs count”, that is to establish an occupation census of both women and men, between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, analysing the verbs used by people to tell what they did in various qualitative rather than quantitative sources, like court records, petitions and tax declarations. The aim was to allow a society to speak with its own language, but also to extend the notion of ‘work’ to all activities that allow people to “make a living”, thus even including gambling on the basis that it could support those who engaged in it. The outcomes of this research show that very few occupations were exclusively male or female and that marriage, for men and women alike, brought with it a considerable increase in access to occupations that carried greater responsibility and independence: for example, women working in trade were almost exclusively married or widowed (Ågren 2017). Other studies, based on similar principles, have yielded interesting results, above all in the case of England. Between the mid-sixteenth and the mid-seventeenth centuries, probably “one of the most litigious periods

38 

A. Bellavitis

in history”, one adult out of seven appeared as a witness in an English court. So as to reduce the risk of corruption, witnesses were asked to prove they were economically independent, that is they had no debts and could support themselves. The same question was asked of women and men alike and around a quarter of all witnesses appearing in English ecclesiastical courts were women. The examination of 13,500 testimonies shows that 85 per cent of males declared a working identity or a role in society, compared to 9 per cent of women. However, during their testimonies, around a quarter of women declared that they supported themselves with their work. This source contains the contradiction between definition of self and narration of one’s life, between ‘I am’ and ‘I do’. It emerges that married women also carried out paid work, despite being legally dependent on their husbands, and the fact that this dependence was particularly strong in the case of England. In this case, too, marriage represented an opportunity to begin new activities and not the moment when women withdrew from paid work outside of the family unit. Furthermore, the testimonies highlighted the role that women performed in the management of resources and assets, even in the areas of credit and loans (Shepard 2015). In almost all cases where women declared a working identity, they defined themselves as spinners. However, reading what they said about their lives, that is “making the verbs count”, we discover that they sewed, embroidered and washed clothes not only for their own families but as remunerated activities. The seamless transition between the ‘normal’ activities carried out within the family and those for the marketplace is typical of women’s work, and we shall return later to the consequences, sometimes unpredictable, of this situation. Only 2 women declared themselves to be laundresses, whereas another 20 described having washed and starched other people’s clothes; only 1 defined herself as a seamstress, but a further 24 stated they had sewn or embroidered for a fee; 7 declared themselves traders, but another 30 stated that their occupations consisted of selling, and the examples could go on. The employment rate among married women was, therefore, far higher than it appeared from the declarations of identity that women gave about themselves (Shepard 2015).

  Working Daughters, Wives, Mothers, Sisters, Widows 

39

The same kind of analysis has been applied to the situation of London in the following centuries. The study of judicial sources of ecclesiastical origin (the London Consistory Court) has shown that, between 1695 and 1725, 81 per cent of unmarried women, 60 per cent of married women and 85 per cent of widows stated that they made their living, entirely or partially, from their work. Furthermore, around half of the aristocrats’ wives (15 out of 32) derived some income from their work, which ranged from commercial activities to letting rooms in their homes (Earle 1989). On the other hand, in the declarations of identity made in London’s criminal courts, occupations appeared more regularly and we can infer that, between 1728 and 1800, 99 per cent of married women had a remunerated occupation in trade, tailoring or catering (Erickson 2008). The examples could go on, and further research will certainly expand this type of analysis in the future. The constant underestimation of female activity, in the quantitative sources of both the early modern age and the last two centuries, and the parallel overestimation of male work have compelled historians to use other sources, of a ‘qualitative’ kind. The use of sources of various kinds has made it possible to identify and quantify female activities, and has also shown that there was no direct and predictable link between work, marital status, age and number of children. It showed that women reacted to the opportunities of the labour market, exploiting every possibility granted to them to earn a living and support their families. They did not stop working when they married nor after the birth of children, but only when their children had grown up enough to earn their own living, support themselves and provide for their parents, as it still happens today in many parts of the world, in contexts where care facilities and old-age pensions are a privilege reserved for a very small part of the population.

Note 1. ASVE: NT (Venice State Archives: Notaries, Last wills), b. 783, n. 1207, 19 February 1574.

40 

A. Bellavitis

References Abreu-Ferreira, D. (2002). Work and Identity in Early Modern Portugal: What Did Gender Have to Do with It? Journal of Social History, 35(4), 859–887. Ågren, M. (Ed.). (2017). Making a Living, Making a Difference. Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bellavitis, A., & Piccone Stella, S. (Eds.). (2008). Flessibili/precarie. Special Issue of Genesis, VII, 1–2. Bellavitis, A., Filippini, N. M., & Sega, M. T. (Eds.). (1990). Perle e impiraperle. Un lavoro di donne a Venezia tra ‘800 e’900. Venice: Arsenale. Cavallo, S. (2006). Métiers apparentés. Barbiers-chirurgiens et artisans du corps à Turin (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle). Histoire Urbaine, 15, 27–48. Chojnacka, M. (2001). Working Women of Early Modern Venice. Baltimore/ London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Collins, J. B. (1989). The Economic Role of Women in Seventeenth-Century France. French Historical Studies, 16(2), 436–470. Earle, P. (1989). The Female Labour Market in London in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries. Economic History Review, s. II,42(3), 328–353. Erickson, A. M. (2008). Married Women’s Occupations in Eighteenth-Century London. Continuity and Change, 23(2), 267–307. Garden, M. (1970). Lyon et les Lyonnais au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Groppi, A. (2002). Une ressource légale pour une pratique illégale. Les juifs et les femmes contre la corporation des tailleurs dans la Rome pontificale (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles). In R. Ago (Ed.), The Value of the Norm/Il valore delle norme (pp. 137–162). Rome: Biblink. Humphries, J., & Sarasúa, C. (2012). Off the Record: Reconstructing Women’s Labor Force Participation in the European Past. Feminist Economics, 18(4), 39–67. Hunt, M. (1996). The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family in England (pp. 1680–1780). Berkeley: University of California Press. Kuklo, C. (2005). Les femmes seules chefs de famille dans la société urbaine à la fin de l’Ancienne Pologne. In M.  Wilska (Ed.), La femme dans la société médiévale et moderne (pp.  211–235). Warsaw: Institut d’histoire Académie polonaise des sciences. Palazzi, M. (1990). “Tessitrici, serve, treccole”. Donne, lavoro e famiglia a Bologna nel Sette- cento. In S. Cavaciocchi (Ed.), La donna nell’economia,

  Working Daughters, Wives, Mothers, Sisters, Widows 

41

secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (pp. 359–376). Florence: Le Monnier. Pelaja, M. (1990). Relazioni personali e vincoli di gruppo. Il lavoro delle donne nella Roma dell’Ottocento. Memoria, 30, 45–54. Polónia, A. (2009). Women’s Participation in Labour and Business in the European Maritime Societies in the Early Modern Period. A Case Study (Portugal, 16th Century). In S. Cavaciocchi (Ed.), La famiglia nell’economia europea, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studio della Fondazione Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (pp. 705–719). Florence: Firenze University Press. Ramiro Moya, F. (2012). Mujeres y trabajo en la Zaragoza del siglo XVIII. Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza. Schmidt, A. (2009). Women and Guilds: Corporations and Female Labour Market Participation in Early Modern Holland. Gender and History, 21(1), 170–189. Schmidt, A., & van Nederveen Meerkerk, E. (2012). Reconsidering the “First Male-Breadwinner Economy”: Women’s Labor Force Participation in the Netherlands, 1600–1900. Feminist Economics, 18(4), 69–96. Shepard, A. (2015). Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, and the Social Order in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. van Nederveen Meerkerk, E. (2008a). Couples Cooperating? Dutch Textile Workers, Family Labour and the ‘Industrious Revolution’, c. 1600–1800. Continuity and Change, 23, 237–266. van Nederveen Meerkerk, E. (2008b). Textile Workers, Gender, and the Organization of Production in the Pre-industrial Dutch Republic. In M. Cassidy-Welch & P. Sherlock (Eds.), Practices of Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (pp. 215–234). Turnhout: Brepols. Wiesner, M. E. (1996). Gender and the Worlds of Work. In B. Scribner (Ed.), Germany. A New Social and Economic History, vol. 1, 1450–1630 (pp. 209–232). London/New York/Sidney/Auckland: Arnold. Wiesner, M.  E. (1999). Having Her Own Smoke. Employment and Independence for Singlewomen in Germany, 1400–1750. In J. M. Bennett & A.  M. Froide (Eds.), Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800 (pp. 192–216). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Zucca Micheletto, B. (2008). Lavoro, figli ed economia domestica nella Torino di Antico Regime. Genesis, VII(1–2), 165–192. Zucca Micheletto, B. (2013). Reconsidering Women’s Labor Force Participation Rates in Eighteenth-Century Turin. Feminist Economics, 19(4), 200–223.

4 The ‘Decline Thesis’ and the Guilds: An ‘Accordion Movement’?

The early modern age underwent some profound changes in the economic and institutional spheres, and historiography has long focused on the transformations in women’s work over that period. In 1919, Alice Clark, in a study on British manufacturing, had argued that women had been progressively excluded from the labour market as craft products were increasingly made in factories rather than at home. From the seventeenth century, a progressive loss of “status” of women’s work had taken place, whose causes should be sought in the development of a capitalist-­ type mode of production and in the growing separation between workplace and family home (Clark 1919). On the other hand, in 1930, Ivy Pinchbeck had stated that the massive entry of women into British manufacturing at the time of the Industrial Revolution had offered them greater opportunities for emancipation, by pushing them out of their homes (Pinchbeck 1930). In an article from 1988, Judith Bennett criticised “the tempting specter of a ‘golden age’” that “has haunted the study of preindustrial women since the earliest decades of this century”, concluding that The history of women’s work suggests that women were clustered in low-­ skilled, low-status, low-paying occupations in 1200 as in 1900. A female © The Author(s) 2018 A. Bellavitis, Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96541-3_4

43

44 

A. Bellavitis

wage earner in the thirteenth century lived in a very different world from her counterpart in the nineteenth century, but they both likely found jobs only in female occupations and received wages much lower than those of male workers. (Bennett 1988: 269, 278)

This is undoubtedly true, and we could also add that this situation continued beyond the nineteenth century and is to some extent still true today. However, as historians, we cannot simply observe the universality of “male dominance” (Bourdieu 1998), or the enduring of a system of patriarchal relations, understood as a “pervading societal system or set of institutional arrangements which accept, reinforce or structure male hegemony” (Honeyman and Goodman 1991: 609). “Under the patriarchal umbrella” (Chojnacki 2000: 6), there have been infinite variations we can no longer ignore, and the great changes that characterised the early modern age, from the sudden expansion of the known world to the development of state organisations, had consequences on the possibilities of work and of economic agency of European women. Since the 1980s, multiple studies have investigated and complicated the notion of ‘decline’ in the context of female labour and, above all, of the guilds, during the transitionary years from the mediaeval to the early modern ages. Many of these studies concerned the German area, and have highlighted a regression as compared to the late mediaeval age, when “the need for labour after the Black Death opened up opportunities for work”, also for women (Ward 2002: 75; Angers 1991). Martha Howell, in her research on the northern regions of the Holy Roman Empire and on Flanders, in addition to insisting on the changes in the modes of production, which gradually left the family unit to relocate outside, thus becoming increasingly incompatible with the family duties of women, put forward another set of explanations, linked to the exclusion of women from political power. In the cases of Frankfurt or Cologne in the last centuries of the Middle Ages, the progressive transformation of the guilds into political bodies with roles in city government automatically excluded women from them. In systems based on individual representation, even with criteria linked to social status, such as republics and urban councils, women could not have any political role, whereas they could in monarchical political systems based on the rule by a family (Howell 1986, 1988).

  The ‘Decline Thesis’ and the Guilds: An ‘Accordion Movement’? 

45

Merry Wiesner attributed the exclusion of women from early modern guilds mainly to two concomitant factors: the economic difficulties associated with the sixteenth-century demographic growth, which prompted a restriction in the access to the privileges associated with guild membership, and the progressive establishment within the Protestant movements of a new family model that emphasised the role of the husband as head of the family and tended to limit the freedom of women, and in particular their independence as workers (Wiesner 1986). In some German cities, guild regulations forbade master craftsmen to marry women of questionable morality or to continue living with wives accused of adultery, since any husband unable to control his wife could not be a good craftsman (Wiesner 1996). More recently, and still with reference to southern Germany, Sheilagh Ogilvie introduced the notion of “social capital”: in a context of growing competition, guilds increasingly restricted access to the social capital represented by guild membership to male, Christian workers, excluding both women and Jews (Ogilvie 2003). In the guilds of many German states, master craftsmen could only work with male apprentices and workers, and the only women allowed into the workshops were, in theory at least, their wives, who could not independently carry out any other craft except sewing and spinning. Rather paradoxically, some of these wives are found to be involved in very masculine jobs, as documents of the time describe the work of the wife of a mason building a wall, that of a female plumber repairing the city fountain, or that of a female cooper carrying wooden barrels into the forest (Ogilvie 2013). The case of Calvinist Geneva confirms this moralistic change: here, during the sixteenth century, the municipal council repeatedly refused to allow men and women to work together in the workshops of canvas weavers, silk carders and tailors, which made it difficult, if not impossible, for a widower master craftsman to hire female apprentices or for the widow of a master craftsman to hire male workers (Mottu-Weber 1990). The consequences of the Protestant Reformation on the models of women’s work, and in particular on the employment opportunities available to women, have been the subject of much research and numerous debates in recent years. The emphasis has been on the strengthening of the role of men as husbands and heads of their families, to the detriment

46 

A. Bellavitis

of the autonomy of wives and children, as a result of the concentration in a single person of male roles of authority that in the Catholic religion were separate, that is the religious role of the priest and the secular one of the pater familias, now combined in the figure of the Protestant pastor. In contrast, it has been argued that the emergence of a new female figure, the pastor’s wife, with a public role recognised by the community, paved the way for women’s employment emancipation (Roper 1989; Marshall 1989). In addition to her normal duties to manage her household and domestic staff, a pastor’s wife had to provide assistance to vulnerable members of the community, and also fulfil the role of midwife. As we shall see, the religious function of the midwife, who was responsible for baptising newborns if their lives were in danger, but also for reporting abortions and infanticides, became increasingly important in the early modern age, both in Catholic and in Protestant communities, but, in the religious laws of Braunschweig and Hamburg, midwives were called “servants of the church” (Schorn-Schütte 1999). A central aspect of the debate on the effects of the Reformation on women’s roles is the so-called Protestant ‘philogamy’, namely the rejection of priests’ celibacy and the elevation of marriage as the only possible and desirable life choice for good Christians. On the one hand, the roles of wife and mother were strengthened but, on the other hand, a woman existed only in relation to the figure of her husband and head of the family. It is almost as if it was deemed necessary to compensate for the increase in value of the female role in the family, implied in the elevation of marriage and in the rejection of celibacy, by removing the working independence of women, so as to avoid the risks arising from a strengthening of female figures in society. The insistence on marriage as the only possible life choice also resulted in a growing mistrust of unmarried women, always considered at risk of falling into prostitution and of threatening the peaceful family lives of honest citizens and heads of family. In 1684, the Strasbourg City Council ordered all unmarried women living in the city to register with the authorities. The ordinance, which did not include domestic servants, was motivated by the arrival in the city of “immoral and indecent women” who “disturbed the honoured citizens with their scandalous lifestyle”. Where admission to the guilds was limited to the children of master

  The ‘Decline Thesis’ and the Guilds: An ‘Accordion Movement’? 

47

craftsmen or to men who had married the daughter or widow of a master craftsman, the workers marginalised by this change reacted by refusing not only the presence of women in the guilds but also marriage, by then an absolute prerequisite to be admitted to a guild and become a master craftsman. A new male code of honour was established within the male workers’ living communities, which were subject to the authority of a ‘father’ and a ‘mother’—the master craftsman and his wife—and showed paradoxical similarities precisely with the monastic communities that the Protestant Reformation had abolished. In some regions of the Empire, having worked in a guild that admitted women became a cause of “dishonour” (Wiesner 1999). However, behind these expressions of extreme religious moralism, typical of a transition period, there were much more practical reasons, and in particular the attempt by the authorities to keep women’s wages down by forcing independent workers, especially in the textile sector, to continue living with their families, or to become subject to the authority of a master craftsman. Faced with the repeated orders by the authorities of the city of Augsburg during the sixteenth century, female spinners replied that they were not so stupid as to work with a master weaver when they could earn three times as much by spinning independently and then selling their product to weavers (Wiesner 1999). In Württemberg, in the seventeenth century, the term Eigenbrötlerinnen, “women who earn their own bread”, took on a negative connotation and citizens were ordered to report to the authorities those who welcomed them in their homes. Strict control was imposed to ensure that these women only engaged in spinning and did not contribute to other stages of textile manufacturing, and the ducal authorities imposed fines on towns and villages employing unmarried women in other activities, in addition to setting a maximum, and of course very low, rate of pay for female spinners (Ogilvie 1990). In a situation of both social and political tensions, religious and economic motivations led to the marginalisation of women from the labour market but, even in this context, the actual effectiveness of prohibitions and regulations is doubtful. The weavers from Augsburg described a situation intolerable to them: independent women, who decided when and for whom to work and who represented a bad example for young women moving to town from the surrounding countryside. The city council went

48 

A. Bellavitis

as far as banishing the women who spun independently and anyone who contracted them, but these measures turned out to be totally ineffective, and the documents of the time continued to record the presence of women not only working independently as spinners but even subcontracting work to immigrant spinners and subsequently selling their thread to master weavers (Wiesner 1999). According to Heide Wunder, a process of “familialization of work and life” had in fact started before the sixteenth century and Reformation ideas about the family did not create the bourgeois family, but resulted from it (Wunder 1992; Wiesner 2008). In that part of Europe that remained Catholic, from the middle of the sixteenth century, the educational model of the Counter-Reformation exalted women’s activities exercised within the home, like embroidery, then considered as a “virtuous” hobby without economic value (Plebani 2016). The multiplication in Catholic countries of institutions for work training of young women is a typical phenomenon of this period and distrust of unmarried women was certainly not just a Protestant phenomenon. In 1610 the first women’s prison was founded in Madrid with the explicit purpose of punishing women “who do not want to submit to serving and vagrants”, that is to say, as a coercive means to orient them towards domestic service, forbidding any other choice of greater personal autonomy (López Barahona 2016: 90). In eighteenth-century Italy, “for working-class spinsters it was enough to be found alone on streets at night to be arrested and often listed as prostitutes” (Palazzi 1990: 452). In the 1990s, the “decline thesis”, referring to the exclusion of women from the guilds, was criticised by Angela Groppi, who proposed the image of an “accordion-like movement” characterised by phases of inclusiveness and exclusion, linked above all to the economic situation (Groppi 1990, 1996). In the early modern age, coinciding with periods of economic difficulty in a particular sector, there was a tendency to exclude women or to restrict access to the guilds only to those who belonged to a master craftsman’s family. In London, in the mid-sixteenth century, the weavers’ guild excluded master craftsmen’s widows too; bakers were ­forbidden from hiring women and in other crafts female work was only authorised in the back of workshops (Laurence 1994).

  The ‘Decline Thesis’ and the Guilds: An ‘Accordion Movement’? 

49

In Venice, in the mediaeval statutes of textile and food guilds the term puellae (girls) is used and in some cases, as in the guild of silk velvet weavers, even that of magistrae (mistresses) (Greci 1996; Rauch 2009). In the early modern age, however, restrictions were imposed: in 1596, the guild of fustian weavers limited access to the widows or orphaned daughters of ‘chief masters’, and in 1632 they were also forbidden to have apprentices and workers. In 1680, silk weavers decided that “from now on […] no one from our guild will be allowed to let women or girls of any kind weave at the loom, unless they are the wives or daughters of masters”. The guild of the “English-style silk stockings”, established in 1657, excluded women from loom work in 1704 (Panciera 1990: 592). In the same year, the “brothers of the silk and mercers’ guild” successfully asked that the mercers’ guild, to which they belonged, stop admitting women “as chief masters of this guild, whether with shops or without, whether in a major or minor art, or as members” (Bellavitis 2002: 90). In Rome, in the eighteenth century, weavers’ and barbers’ guilds introduced increasingly restrictive rules for the widows of master craftsmen (Groppi 2002a). In Madrid, the new guilds, founded in the sixteenth century, when the city became the capital of the Spanish Empire, excluded women from apprenticeship and, as it has been written, “since the beginning of the seventeenth century, guilds embarked on a real crusade against female mastery” (López Barahona 2016: 77). In contrast, in Zaragoza, explicit prohibitions to admit women to the guilds were rare and appear only in two statutes, the middlemen’s from 1505 and the mattress makers’ from 1556 (Ramiro Moya 2012). In many cases, however, the tendency to exclude female workers from organised trades gradually decreased. In London, the restrictions imposed in the sixteenth century were suppressed or simply no longer respected in the seventeenth century, during the Civil War and the Restoration, because the guilds failed to regain control of the labour market and at the end of the century their power declined significantly. The guilds which had been founded in the sixteenth century, such as the scriveners’ and wheelwrights’, admitted women from the beginning and, in the eighteenth century, the goldsmiths’ welcomed both women and men, employed in a variety of jobs, including the manufacture of watches and toys. In 1726, in London, there were 40 widows who managed goldsmith

50 

A. Bellavitis

shops and had many female goldsmith apprentices, but most women active in that trade were employed in the lower-paid, finishing jobs (Laurence 1994). Sometimes the guilds’ opposition was worn down by the women’s persistence and eventually the guilds started to admit them, as it was the case in eighteenth-century Oxford, where the Mercers’ Company in 1770 finally decided to admit single women (Hill 2001). Even in the case of Venice, these were steps taken to deal with a particular economic situation and the trend was later reversed. In 1744, in the guild of fustian weavers, there were 21 female and 41 male master craftsmen, in addition to around 50 more women employed in the workshops. The expansion of production in the first half of the century was accompanied by the demand for new products, whose production began in the 1740s in the Hospital of Santa Maria Maggiore, where orphaned girls were paid a third of what the guild weavers received. In 1745, apprentices of both sexes were admitted, with no restrictions imposed on their wages (Panciera 1990: 592). The case of silk weavers, to which we shall return in greater detail later, confirms this trend: in 1754, in fact, women were allowed in the guild as masters in order to relaunch a declining industry. If the Venetian silk trade was “rescued by women”, it must be said that the guild’s senior positions remained in the hands of men and that, even though they were called maestre, using the same title given to male masters, women were still paid less for their work (Della Valentina 2012). In Zaragoza, during the early modern age, the rights of master craftsmen’s widows increased in some important guilds, such as the tailors’ and the bookbinders’. It is more surprising to discover the signatures of masters’ widows on some guild documents, such as a wool weavers’ decree from 1760, signed by 36 members, three of whom were widows, because even though they had been admitted to the male guilds, women did not usually participate in public meetings and in guild governance. In Spain, in the 1770s and 1780s, many restrictions to the presence of women in craft guilds were abolished by royal decree (Ramiro Moya 2012). In Gouda there existed for a short period a guild of female hacklers, who combed hemp and flax for the rope-making industry. It was created in 1655, after a revolt of female hacklers, complaining that their wages were too low, in a period in which the rope-making industry coped with labour shortages and struggled to keep up with demand, but

  The ‘Decline Thesis’ and the Guilds: An ‘Accordion Movement’? 

51

it was abolished in 1664, because “the craft declined”. In seventeenthcentury Leiden, the guild of blacksmiths, locksmiths and knife-makers modified its rule concerning widows in order to ensure the continuation of the craft within the city: many workshops fell under the control of widows and to avoid the closing of these workshops, the guild abolished the rule requiring the presence of a journeyman in workshops headed by widows (Schmidt 2009). On the basis of the tax register of 1674, recording Gouda’s household heads with their occupations, Ariadne Schmidt got to the conclusion that: If we exclude the hired female labour in the rope-making industry and assume that the beer sellers were members of the publicans’ guild, approximately 27 per cent of all female household heads with a recorded occupation were engaged in guild-regulated work. Including female hacklers, this proportion was 40 per cent, compared to roughly 54 per cent of all male household heads with a recorded occupation. (Schmidt 2009: 181)

The ‘decline thesis’ referring to the exclusion of women from the guilds is strongly refuted by the case of France, where, from the end of the seventeenth century, following a decision by Louis XIV and his minister Colbert, all the guilds were progressively opened to women and all crafts were required to be organised in guilds. The aim was to increase control of, and tax revenue from, craftsmen, but the result was, in addition to the admission of women to all organised crafts, generally without the right to hold office, also the foundation, in Paris and in Rouen, where they had existed since the Middle Ages, of new female guilds, where managerial positions were also held by women. We shall return to the French case later on, but we mention here what is a matter of great importance in European history and in particular in the history of women’s work, that is the role played by the guilds in controlling the workforce. This is a fundamental and constitutive part of their institutional identity and social function, which could, however, have contradictory effects on the female labour force, insofar as belonging to a guild as a mistress, despite granting identity and privilege, also implied a set of limits and restrictions and represented an economic investment that was not always sustainable.

52 

A. Bellavitis

The guilds granted rights and imposed duties, punishing those who evaded their rules: Padua’s wool guild, like other guilds in Europe, never excluded women but punished illegal behaviour such as manufacturing prohibited or smuggled products (Caracausi 2008). Such behaviour was certainly not a female prerogative, but in the case of women, who received lower wages than male workers for the same job and who, except for a few exceptions, almost never had access to the guilds’ offices, supplementing their earnings illegally could be an even greater need than for men. In eighteenth-century Rome, many seamstresses refused to join the tailors’ guild despite the repeated protests and complaints by the latter, who accused them of working illegally outside the guild rules and without paying their registration fees (Groppi 2002b). In Paris, at the end of the seventeenth century, not all women engaged in dress-making accepted the invitation to sign up for the newly established seamstresses’ guild, preferring to continue to work in the family workshop under the headship of the tailor-head of the family or alone, clandestinely, not having the means to pay their registration fee (Crowston 2001). And we can also mention the refusal made in 1711 by the female weavers from Udine and by the region of the proposal to create a guild of weavers, which would also allow women to “employ male weavers and apprentices”, as men did, but only after passing an exam and paying the registration fee (Morassi 1990). The fact remains that these examples, and especially that of France, where not only did entirely female guilds continue to exist from the Middle Ages to the early modern age, but where new female guilds were founded at the end of the seventeenth century, contradict the ‘decline thesis’ or, at the very least, restrict its geographical boundaries to some European regions, and to some economic, political or religious contexts. Over the past few years, many studies have focused on the history of guilds in the early modern age, so much so that reference has been made to a “return of the guilds”, after a period when historical research had concentrated on the many other aspects of urban work (Crowston 2008). From the point of view of gender history, the public and political role of craft guilds plays a decisive and discriminatory role, and is the reason why it is important and significant to highlight the cases where, on the contrary, women played a role in these institutions. On the other hand, if it

  The ‘Decline Thesis’ and the Guilds: An ‘Accordion Movement’? 

53

is undeniable that craft guilds were fundamental structures of organisation and control of the workforce in urban contexts, it should also be said that not all crafts were organised in guilds, and that in some cities, such as Turin or Lyon, they became established very late (Cerutti 1990). Furthermore, women could also have specific work spaces reserved for them in guild-organised crafts, but outside of them: this is what happened at the end of the fifteenth century in Basel’s weavers’ guild or, for much of the sixteenth century, in Venice’s haberdashers’ guild. There was, however, the constant risk of overlaps resulting in frequent judicial conflicts, when the guild hierarchies, with the pretext of competition, would attempt to give the craftswomen an ultimatum: withdraw from production or pay guild taxes, with the consequence, generally, of encouraging illegal work (Simon-Muscheid 1990). A guild structure, with its rigid regulations, did not embrace the whole world of urban work, but guild archives are a mine of information. This includes what was left out, such as illegal work, which guild regulations and courts tried to oppose, or family work, which appears when reading between the lines of their statutes.

References Angers, D. (1991). Le rôle de la famille et la place de la femme dans l’organisation du travail en Allemagne à la fin du Moyen Âge, bilan historiographique. In C.  Dolan (Ed.), Travail et travailleurs au Moyen Âge et au début des temps modernes (Papers in Medieval Studies, 13) (pp.  63–78). Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Barahona, V. L. (2016). Las trabajadoras en la sociedad madrileña del siglo XVIII. Madrid: ACCI. Bellavitis, A. (2002). Donne, cittadinanza e corporazioni tra Medioevo ed età moderna: ricerche in corso. In N. M. Filippini, T. Plebani, & A. Scattigno (Eds.), Corpi e storia. Donne e uomini dal mondo antico all’età contemporanea (pp. 87–104). Rome: Viella. Bennett, J.  M. (1988). “History That Stands Still”: Women’s Work in the European Past. Feminist Studies, 14(2), 269–283. Bourdieu, P. (1998). La domination masculine. Paris: Le Seuil.

54 

A. Bellavitis

Caracausi, A. (2008). Dentro la bottega. Culture del lavoro in una città dell’Europa moderna. Venice: Marsilio. Cerutti, S. (1990). La ville et les métiers. Naissance d’un langage corporatif (Turin, 17e–18e siècles). Paris: EHESS. Chojnacki, S. (2000). Women and Men in Renaissance Venice. Twelve Essays on Patrician Society. Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Clark, A. (1919). The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century. London/ New York: George Routledge & Sons-Button & Co. Crowston, C. (2001). Fabricating Women. The Seamstresses of Old Regime France (pp. 1675–1791). Durham: Duke University Press. Crowston, C. (2008). Women, Gender and Guilds in Early Modern Europe: An Overview of Recent Research. In J. Lucassen, T. De Moor, & J. L. van Zanden (Eds.), The Return of the Guilds. Supplement of International Review of Social History (Vol. 53, pp. 19–44). Della Valentina, M. (2012). Il setificio salvato dalle donne: le tessitrici veneziane nel Settecento. In A. Bellavitis, N. M. Filippini, & T. Plebani (Eds.), Spazi, poteri, diritti delle donne a Venezia in età moderna (pp.  321–335). Verona: QuiEdit. Greci, R. (1996). Donne e corporazioni: la fluidità di un rapporto. In A. Groppi (Ed.), Il lavoro delle donne (pp. 71–91). Rome/Bari: Laterza. Groppi, A. (1990). Un questionario da arricchire. In S. Cavaciocchi (Ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (pp. 143–154). Florence: Le Monnier. Groppi, A. (1996). Lavoro e proprietà delle donne in età moderna. In A. Groppi (Ed.), Il lavoro delle donne (pp. 119–163). Rome/Bari: Laterza. Groppi, A. (2002a). A Matter of Fact Rather Than Principle: Women, Work and Property in Papal Rome (Eighteenth-Nineteenth Centuries). Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 7(1), 37–55. Groppi A. (2002b). Une ressource légale pour une pratique illégale. Les juifs et les femmes contre la corporation des tailleurs dans la Rome pontificale (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles). In R. Ago (Ed.), The value of the norm/Il valore delle norme (pp. 137–162). Rome: Biblink. Hill, B. (2001). Women Alone. Spinsters in England, 1660–1850. New Haven/ London: Yale University Press. Honeyman, K., & Goodman, J. (1991). Women’s Work, Gender Conflict, and Labour Markets in Europe, 1500–1900. Economic History Review, XLIV(4), 608–628.

  The ‘Decline Thesis’ and the Guilds: An ‘Accordion Movement’? 

55

Howell, M.  C. (1986). Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Howell, M.  C. (1988). Citizenship and Gender: Women’s Political Status in Northern Medieval Cities. In M. Erler & M. Kowaleski (Eds.), Women and Power in the Middle Ages (pp. 37–60). Athens/London: University of Georgia Press. Laurence, A. (1994). Women in England, 1500–1760. A Social History. London: Phoenix Giant. Marshall, S. (1989). Women in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Morassi, L. (1990). La donna nell’economia friulana tra Patriarcato e Repubblica. In S. Cavaciocchi (Ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (pp. 329–344). Florence: Le Monnier. Mottu-Weber, L. (1990). L’évolution des activités professionnelles des femmes à Genève du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle. In S.  Cavaciocchi (Ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII-XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (pp. 345–357). Florence: Le Monnier. Ogilvie, S. (1990). Women and Proto-industrialisation in a Corporate Society: Württemberg Wollen Weaving, 1590–1760. In P.  Hudson & W.  R. Lee (Eds.), Women’s Work and the Family in Historical Perspective (pp.  86–92). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ogilvie, S. (2003). A Bitter Living: Women, Markets, and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ogilvie, S. (2013). Married Women, Work and the Law: Evidence from Early Modern Germany. In C. Beattie & M. F. Stevens (Eds.), Married Women and the Law in Premodern Western Europe (pp. 213–239). Woodbridge/Rochester: Boydell. Palazzi, M. (1990). Female Solitude and Patrilineage. Unmarried Women and Widows During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Journal of Family History, 15, 443–459. Panciera, W. (1990). Emarginazione femminile tra politica salariale e modelli di organizzazione del lavoro nell’industria tessile veneta nel XVIII secolo. In S.  Cavaciocchi (Ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (pp. 585–596). Florence: Le Monnier. Pinchbeck, I. (1930). Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850. London: George Routledge.

56 

A. Bellavitis

Plebani, T. (2016). Dal lavoro alla disciplina Precettistica e libri di ricami. In H. Sanson & F. Lucioli (Eds.), Conduct Literature for and About Women in Italy, 1470–1900 (pp. 303–323). Paris: Garnier. Ramiro Moya, F. (2012). Mujeres y trabajo en la Zaragoza del siglo XVIII. Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza. Rauch, S. (2009). Le mariegole delle arti dei tessitori di seta. I Veluderi (1347–1474) e i Samitari (1370–1475). Venice: Comitato per la pubblicazione delle fonti relative alla storia di Venezia. Roper, L. (1989). The Holy Household. Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Schmidt, A. (2009). Women and Guilds: Corporations and Female Labour Market Participation in Early Modern Holland. Gender and History, 21(1), 170–189. Schorn-Schütte, L. (1999). Il matrimonio come professione: la moglie del pastore evangelico. In S. Seidel Menchi, A. Jacobson Schutte, & T. Kuehn (Eds.), Tempi e spazi di vita femminile tra medioevo ed età moderna (pp. 255–277). Bologna: il Mulino. Simon-Muscheid, C. C. (1990). La lutte des maîtres tisserands contre les tisserandes à Bâle. La condition féminine au XVe siècle. In S. Cavaciocchi (Ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII-XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (pp. 383–389). Florence: Le Monnier. Ward, J. (2002). Women in Medieval Europe, 1200–1500. London: Parson. Wiesner, M. E. (1986). Working Women in Renaissance Germany. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Wiesner, M. E. (1996). Gender and the Worlds of Work. In B. Scribner (Ed.), Germany. A New Social and Economic History, vol. 1, 1450–1630 (pp. 209–232). London/New York/Sidney/Auckland: Arnold. Wiesner, M.  E. (1999). Having Her Own Smoke. Employment and Independence for Singlewomen in Germany, 1400–1750. In J. M. Bennett & A.  M. Froide (Eds.), Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800 (pp. 192–216). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Wiesner, M. E. (2008). Do Women Need the Renaissance? Gender & History, 20(3), 539–557. Wunder, H. (1992). He Is the Sun, She Is the Moon: Women in Early Modern Germany. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

5 From Globalisation to Industrialisation

An interesting prompt to revisit the transition between the Middle Ages and the early modern age from the point of view of the spaces assigned to women in urban economies comes from Martha Howell. Analysing the evolution of trade and of the figure of the merchant in society, Howell came to the conclusion that, at the end of the Middle Ages, the development of commercial exchanges, which led to a redefinition of the role of merchants and of commercial activities, considered undignified activities according to traditional Christian thinking, had an impact on the role that the societies and economies of the time attributed to women’s activities. In this evolution, women were assigned the (negative) role of consumers, while men continued to have the (positive) one of producers. The female propensity to consumption, potentially dangerous for families and society, however, had to be curbed by sumptuary laws, particularly numerous all over Europe in those centuries, and very often addressed specifically to women: in Venice, as in other Italian cities, the magistrates established in 1476 to regulate clothes, ornaments, banquets and all ‘superfluous’ expenses were called “Supervisors of women’s luxury”. In the early modern age, the acceptance of commercial activities and of the wealth they generated, an essential component of the ‘capitalist spirit’, © The Author(s) 2018 A. Bellavitis, Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96541-3_5

57

58 

A. Bellavitis

was therefore the result of a complex socio-cultural process. This gave rise to an exclusively male merchant code of honour, which implied the exclusion from commercial activities of women, who were assigned the management of family consumption. “The story of the commercial revolution in Europe was not, thus, simply an economic history. It was also a social, legal, and cultural history that redefined male and female for a rising class of people, and, in fact, helped define the class itself ” (Howell 2008: 532; 2010). Martha Howell’s suggestion is interesting, and encourages us to reflect on long-term processes and on topics that seem very familiar to us, such as the image of women as consumers and as sensitive to fashion trends, which make them the targets of the advertising campaigns of our time. Although widespread, the tendency to address sumptuary legislation to women cannot be said to be a general trait, and often these rules affected women mainly because families exhibited their wealth through them (Owen Hughes 1990; Muzzarelli and Campanini 2003). The stigmatisation of luxury and excesses in consumption became a topic of debate in eighteenth-century Europe: it took on gender connotations, in the sense that it affected women but also men who, when giving in to the demands of fashion, were criticised as “effeminate” and became a typical nationalist and patriotic theme in British authors, who opposed their sobriety to the excesses of the French (Simonton et al. 2015). The growth of consumption and of a culture of consumption, however, also contributed to the development of the luxury goods market and of the production of clothing and furnishings accessories, which began in Renaissance Italy, and whose circulation was not limited to the élites. Embroidery, lace and sewing work in general, in addition to giving work to women of the lower classes, were also an opportunity for middle-class women to increase their earnings and express their creativity. Some of them appear as the authors of books of embroidery patterns printed in Venice in the sixteenth century (Plebani 2012, 2015). Especially from the eighteenth century, the circulation of goods and the growth of trade contributed all over Europe to the development of manufacturing and commercial activities in the major European cities, where women operated as seamstresses, haberdashers and milliners. In Antwerp, in the second half of the seventeenth century, at least half of the milliner’s shops

  From Globalisation to Industrialisation 

59

were run by women and, in England and Scotland, girls from respectable families of merchants or the lesser nobility, educated to the idea that they should support themselves and that sewing was an occupation suitable to their status, could work as milliners. The sisters of William Hogarth (1697–1764) were milliners and Laurence Stern (1713–1768) recommended this activity to his sister as suitable to her social status. To become a milliner, there would need to be a period of paid apprenticeship, although there was no specific guild for this profession, and many milliners built brilliant careers, thanks to the increasing taste for luxury and consumption in eighteenth-century urban societies (Simonton 2015). Instances of production for own consumption, of closure towards external contributions and of exchanges were limited to some areas of the continent, and did not represent the norm, even in the Middle Ages. The relationships between the individual European economies and of the economies of the various European regions and countries with the rest of the known world, namely Asia and Africa, date back to very ancient times. The cities, and above all the political and economic capitals, attracted people and traded goods with distant countries and regions, which means, for example, that in Florence the wool worked in the workshops which employed many spinners came from England or Spain, and that, in Venice, women and girls wove silk and sold spices that came from the Far East. However, the rapid development of international trade at the beginning of the early modern age also had significant consequences on women’s activities, creating new job opportunities and allowing areas which had hitherto been excluded to enter the international trade circuits. Take for example the case of glass beads produced in Murano and used as currency in the African market of slaves sent to the American colonies; during the seventeenth century, their production was also started in the United Provinces. Along the African coast, ancient Venetian ‘lampwork’ beads can still be found today and the tradition of manufacturing a great variety of products with beads lives on, although the beads are now mostly made of plastic: in South Africa, even life-size statues of Nelson Mandela made of wire and beads can be found. The Venetian glassmaking industry had been confined to the island of Murano in the thirteenth century, in order to remove from the city a

60 

A. Bellavitis

potentially dangerous production process, in view of the fires that could develop in the furnaces that had to remain constantly lit. The beads were made by cutting light, perforated glass canes into tiny tubes or by melting glass rods of various shapes and colours in the flame of an oil lamp and dropping beads of molten glass on a metal wire. When the glass paste cooled, the metal wire was extracted, obtaining the threading hole. This manufacturing technique, called ‘lampwork’, also took place in the city, in small workshops. Women worked both in ‘lampwork’ manufacture and in the sorting of beads, but above all in the threading of beads in long threads, from which necklaces and ornaments of all kinds were made. The impiraresse, as the threaders were called in Venetian, held in their hands up to 60 needles, arranged in a fan, which they used to ‘fish’ the beads out of a basin, a repetitive but specialised operation, passed on by women from generation to generation, which took place in their homes or, more often, in the street, on their doorsteps, where women and girls worked together. The mistre (mistresses), organised the work done at home by the threaders and by the women who made the ‘lampwork’ beads. In 1740, a bead-maker’s accounts recorded a debt of almost 100 ducats with some mistre and, in the same years, the cutters, who made beads by cutting glass canes, complained against the lowering of their wages due to “bartering  by the mistre”, and their “working secretly at night”. In 1741, the hierarchies of the bead-makers’ guild reported “two women of Greek nationality” for buying large quantities of beads “at a very low price” from threaders and giving them out to be worked with by other women, then selling the artefacts to merchants “as if they were legitimate master craftsmen”. The situation was particularly complex: this was not just an urban putting-out system dependent on the guilds, but a clandestine parallel organisation, in this case further complicated by the fact that the Greek population in Venice enjoyed certain privileges and that some areas of the Castello district, where the processing of beads was one of the main activities offered to women, were not subject to guild jurisdiction because they were situated adjacently to the Greek diplomatic residence (Trivellato 2000: 180–181). This activity, which had grown considerably since the seventeenth century, even, as we have seen, giving rise to behaviours bordering or beyond legality, at its peak, in the nineteenth century, employed thousands of

  From Globalisation to Industrialisation 

61

women, but went abruptly downhill after World War II, following a decline in demand from the colonies. To quote a 1945 note from the management of the main Murano beads’ factory, sales fell due to the “rapid development in civilisation of African and Asian countries with the consequent fatal evolution in the natives’ taste also with regard to their traditional ornaments” (Bellavitis 1990: 18). In the case of Venice, it was the rapid development of a type of production within an industrial and mercantile context that had been at the centre of international trade for centuries but, in other contexts, the request coming from the colonial markets introduced in the networks of long-distance trade European areas which had up until then remained at the margins. At the end of the sixteenth century, Scottish wool fabric began to be exported to the Netherlands, France and the Baltic countries, but the boom in demand took place between the 1630s and the 1660s, during the short-lived colonisation of Brazil by the Dutch West India Company. Woollen fabric made by women in the Scottish countryside left the port of Aberdeen, were finished in Holland, and shipped to the Brazilian sugar plantations, where they were used as blankets by slaves and as merchandise with local populations. In this case, it was not so much urban work, as manufacturing work carried out in the countryside and villages for the urban market, or rather a type of production chain that has been defined as “proto-industrial” and where female work had a central role (Desbrisay 2012). The increasing presence, in the European countryside, of manufacturing activities organised by merchants-entrepreneurs coming from the cities is the basis of the so-called protoindustry model formulated in the 1970s by Franklin Mendels. In his view, domestic production for the market represented an intermediate stage between domestic production for own consumption and the Industrial Revolution. The greater availability of work involved women and children in productive activities, mainly spinning, increasing the earning opportunities for the whole family, but especially for women, thus improving their status and level of independence within the family. Furthermore, it brought about an increase in birth rate, as being able to work at home allowed young couples to leave their families of origin much earlier, and also because the children could be involved in domestic production for the external m ­ arket,

62 

A. Bellavitis

thus turning from mouths to feed into potential producers. This process allegedly took place from the sixteenth century and accelerated in the eighteenth, following the development of international trade and the consequent increase in the demand for products to be exported (Mendels 1972; Kriedte et al. 1984). The so-called manufacturing in the countryside took place in many European regions, especially in the eighteenth century, but without necessarily being a stage heralding the development of concentrated manufacture of the Industrial Revolution. The “proto-industrial model” could have a useful explanatory function in very specific contexts, such as some regions of England, but has been criticised because a similar demographic change is found in areas that were not affected by this type of productive organisation, or because the rural home production managed by merchants was widespread in many parts of Europe, with no connection with the export markets or with a later development in manufacturing comparable to that of the English Industrial Revolution (Houston and Snell 1984). However, the consequences of the increasing use of rural labour on some groups of female urban workers must not be ignored; these were potentially disastrous, according to the 40 women who, in 1628, broke into a meeting of the Consell de Cent (Council of the One Hundred) in Barcelona, insulting the councillors and accusing them of forcing them into poverty because they did not prevent wool from being carded and spun outside the city. In the eighteenth century, the widespread use made in the textile industry in Barcelona of female rural, home-based labour was a growing threat to the craftsmen of the city guilds and prompted some restrictive measures by the guilds against female labour, in an attempt to protect the employment of male workers. In 1745, a rule by the silk-throwers’ guild decreed that master craftsmen could only resort to their wives as additional workforce, forbidding the employment of other women or apprentices (Vicente Valentín 1994). The model of the ‘industrious revolution’ proposed by Jan de Vries is also based on the expansion in international trade that characterised the early modern age. It focuses on the Netherlands of the ‘golden age’, the seventeenth century, a country characterised by a production primarily oriented towards the market, by capitalist relationships, by the prevalence

  From Globalisation to Industrialisation 

63

of waged labour in the textile industry and, above all, by the development of consumption. In this context, the increase in demand for consumer goods is seen as the beginning of a series of choices made by individuals and households, which resulted in an increase both in production and in the demand for goods, and, in a sort of ‘virtuous cycle’ (or a ‘vicious’ one), also in the work required to manufacture and buy them. The intensification of work, however, resulted in increased exploitation of the family workforce, particularly women and children, with a negative effect on the rates of literacy and schooling (De Vries 1994, 2008). The theme of consumption has been central for some years now, particularly in studies on material culture and everyday life. Research on inventories and wills, in England and the Netherlands, as well as in France, Italy and Germany, has highlighted the increased presence of consumer goods in homes, and not just in those belonging to the élites, sometimes stressing the particular attention paid by women to objects and material goods, a fact that, if observed in last wills, depended also, in many cases, to the rules on inheritance, that privileged the transmission of immovable goods through the male line (Berg 1996; Sarti 2003; Ago 2006; Rublack 2010). The model of the Dutch “industrious revolution” has however been called into question by new research, which shows that, in the Netherlands, the increase in consumption did not occur in the families of independent craftsmen, where the surplus produced by labour had to be constantly reinvested in the workshop, but rather in the families of craftsmen whose members had been absorbed by waged labour at the time of the great development of the textile industry (van Nederveen Meerkerk 2008a, b). These models were notably built from a north-western point of view, focusing on countries such as Germany, Flanders, Northern France, England and the Netherlands, and if they can, to some extent, also be useful for Mediterranean Europe—in particular the growing ‘ruralisation’ of manufacturing is a phenomenon also found in Italy and in Spain—they are on the whole much less significant for the economies of the major Italian mercantile and industrial cities, where industry began early on to use female labour in workshops and in homes, remaining essentially urban for a long time. As we shall see, in important industrial cities such as Florence, Bologna or Venice, the production was carried out

64 

A. Bellavitis

in city homes and was organised in a complex, multi-level system: from merchants to master craftsmen, to mistresses who acted as intermediaries with the female home workers. In this hierarchy, women had roles of power and authority, which often caused conflicts within the female crafts world and allowed the mistresses to implement strategies to circumvent the mediation of the master craftsmen and deal directly with the merchant-entrepreneurs, who also represented the political élite. Even from a geographical point of view, the Italian situation was not limited to the city-country relationship, but was complicated by a complex and hierarchical urban network. For this reason, it would be more appropriate to speak of an “eclectic structure” and of “industrialisation of minor centres” and not just of “ruralisation” (Panciera 1996: 178; Clark 1995). By introducing an intermediate stage between the pre-industrial and the industrial ages, the proto-industrial model has contributed, with other factors, to reducing the ‘revolutionary’ scope of the so-called Industrial Revolution, which, however, precisely as far as for women’s and children’s work is concerned, still has, especially in the English context, undeniable specificities. However, we cannot speak of an opposition between concentrated and mechanised industry with a high-productivity rate and a form of manufacturing very traditional in its techniques and modes of production. Between the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, there was rather coexistence between mechanical spinning concentrated in large establishments and home spinning. The interconnection between the two modes of production made it possible to diversify the risks and use the low-cost labour force represented by women and children, whose exploitation may have reached its highest levels precisely during the period of the Industrial Revolution, even though it is very difficult to find precise quantitative data on female and child labour, mostly missing from the English statistics and wage records of the time (Humphries 2010). The work of women and children has always been an indispensable pillar of support of family income, even more so at the end of the eighteenth century, when population growth had a direct impact on the number of children available on the labour market, thus pushing producers to adapt forms and techniques of production to the size of children’s arms. At the same time, the use of female labour in British factories was based on skills acquired in domestic production.

  From Globalisation to Industrialisation 

65

Additionally, the impact of immigrant female labour to the cities, a phenomenon recorded all over Europe, was amplified, in the British case, by changes in the structure of agricultural production (Sharpe 1995). The exploitation of child labour was not new and had always been fundamental both in agriculture and in the expansion of manufacturing in early modern times, all over Europe (Borrás Llop 2013). In the workshops run by women where knitted stockings were made—a production which developed rapidly in sixteenth-century Italian cities—even very small children were employed on very low salaries (Bellavitis 2006; Caracausi 2014). When, in the seventeenth century, an invention that allowed the mechanisation of the first phase of silk processing—the winding—spread from Bologna throughout Italy, in the silk mills child labour, both male and female, replaced the work of the home winders. At the end of the eighteenth century, the silk mill entrepreneurs from Modena asked the Grande Albergo dei Poveri, the local poorhouse, to supply their mills with “the necessary children”, after training them to discipline, or, as they wrote, “having taken away their freedom” (Poni 1996: 285). Studies on seventeenth-century Holland have highlighted the important role of child labour in all sectors of activity, both at home and in concentrated manufacturing, where orphans were often employed: in Leiden, between 1607 and 1623, 84 per cent of orphaned boys and 73.5 per cent of girls employed in city factories were working in the textile industry. For girls, this was mainly the clothing industry, whereas for boys the activities were more varied. When, during the eighteenth century, the first symptoms of a crisis were felt, after a century of economic expansion, one of the measures aimed at counteracting its effects was represented by workhouses, where children were mainly employed in spinning (van Nederveen Meerkerk and Schmidt 2008). The new features of the Industrial Revolution age were the size of the phenomenon and the development of new modes of industrial production based on very low wages, increasing intensification of work and greater regulation of the workforce. In some cases, female and child labour was not complementary but an alternative to male labour, chosen in preference for its lower cost, but precisely for this reason its use did not encourage investments in production and technological innovations (Berg and Hudson 1992).

66 

A. Bellavitis

References Ago, R. (2006). Il gusto delle cose. Una storia degli oggetti nella Roma del Seicento. Rome: Donzelli. Bellavitis, A. (1990). In fabbrica e in casa. Il lavoro femminile nelle “conterie” a Venezia. In A. Bellavitis, N. M. Filippini, & M. T. Sega (Eds.), Perle e impiraperle (pp. 9–21). Venice: Arsenale. Bellavitis, A. (2006). Le travail des femmes dans les contrats d’apprentissage de la Giustizia Vecchia (Venise, XVIe siècle). In I. Chabot, J. Hayez, & D. Lett (Eds.), La famille, les femmes et le quotidien (XIVe–XVIIIe siècle) (pp. 181–195). Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Berg, M. (1996). Women’s Consumption and the Industrial Classes of Eighteenth-Century England. Journal of Social History, 30(2), 415–434. Berg, M., & Hudson, P. (1992). Rehabilitating the Industrial Revolution. The Economic History Review, n.s., 45(1), 24–50. Borrás Llop, J.  M. (Ed.). (2013). El trabajo infantil en España (1700–1950). Barcelona: Icaria Editorial. Caracausi, A. (2014). Beaten Children and Women’s Work in Early Modern Italy. Past and Present, 222(1), 95–128. Clark, P. (1995). Introduction. In P. Clark (Ed.), Small Towns in Early Modern Europe (pp. 1–21). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Vries, J. (1994). The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution. The Journal of Economic History, 54(2), 249–270. De Vries, J.  (2008). The Industrious Revolution. Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Desbrisay, G. (2012). Aberdeen and the Dutch Atlantic: Women and Woolens in the Seventeenth Century. In D. Catterall & J. Campbell (Eds.), Women in Port. Gendering Communities, Economies, and Social Networks in Atlantic Port Cities, 1500–1800 (pp. 69–102). Leiden/Boston: Brill. Houston, R., & Snell, K.  D. M. (1984). Proto-Industrialization? Cottage Industry, Social Change, and Industrial Revolution. The Historical Journal, 27(2), 473–492. Howell, M.  C. (2008). The Gender of Europe’s Commercial Economy, 1200–1700. Gender & History, 20(3), 519–538. Howell, M. C. (2010). Commerce Before Capitalism in Europe (pp. 1300–1600). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  From Globalisation to Industrialisation 

67

Humphries, J.  (2010). Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kriedte, P., Medick, H., & Schlumbohm, J. (1984). L’industrializzazione prima dell’industrializzazione. Bologna: il Mulino (ed. or. 1977). Mendels, F. (1972). Protoindustrialization: The First Phase of the Industrialization Process. Journal of Economic History, 32(1), 241–261. Muzzarelli, G., & Campanini, A. (Eds.). (2003). Disciplinare il lusso. La legislazione suntuaria in Europa tra Medioevo ed età moderna. Roma: Carocci. Owen Hughes, D. (1990). Le mode femminili e il loro controllo. In G. Duby & M. Perrot (Eds.), Storia delle donne in Occidente, vol. II, Il Medioevo, ed. by C. Klapisch-Zuber (pp. 166–193). Rome/Bari: Laterza. Panciera, W. (1996). L’arte matrice. I lanifici della Repubblica di Venezia nei secoli XVII e XVIII. Treviso: Fondazione Benetton/Canova. Plebani, T. (2012). Ricami di ago e d’inchiostro: una ricchezza per la città. Archivio Veneto, 3, 97–115. Plebani, T. (2015). I segreti e gli inganni dei libri di ricamo uomini con l’ago e donne virtuose. Quaderni Storici, 148/a(L(1)), 201–230. Poni, C. (1996). Tecnologie, organizzazione produttiva e divisione sessuale del lavoro: il caso dei mulini da seta. In A. Groppi (Ed.), Il lavoro delle donne (pp. 269–296). Rome/Bari: Laterza. Rublack, U. (2010). Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sarti, R. (2003). Vita di casa. Abitare, mangiare, vestire nell’Europa moderna. Roma/Bari: Laterza. Sharpe, P. (1995). Continuity and Change: Women’s History and Economic History in Britain. The Economic History Review, n.s., 48(2), 353–369. Simonton, D. (2015). Milliners and Marchandes de mode. Gender, Creativity and Skill in the Workplace. In D. Simonton, M. Kaartinen, & A. Montenach (Eds.), Luxury and Gender in European Towns, 1700–1914 (pp.  19–38). New York/London: Routledge. Simonton, D., Kaartinen, M., & Montenach, A. (Eds.). (2015). Luxury and Gender in European Towns, 1700–1914. New York/London: Routledge. Trivellato, F. (2000). Fondamenta dei vetrai. Lavoro, tecnologia e mercato a Venezia tra Sei e Settecento. Rome: Donzelli. van Nederveen Meerkerk, E. (2008a). Couples Cooperating? Dutch Textile Workers, Family Labour and the ‘Industrious Revolution’, c. 1600–1800. Continuity and Change, 23, 237–266.

68 

A. Bellavitis

van Nederveen Meerkerk, E. (2008b). Textile Workers, Gender, and the Organization of Production in the Pre-industrial Dutch Republic. In M. Cassidy-Welch & P. Sherlock (Eds.), Practices of Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (pp. 215–234). Turnhout: Brepols. van Nederveen Meerkerk, E., & Schmidt, A. (2008). Between Wage Labor and Vocation: Child Labor in Dutch Urban Industry, 1600–1800. Journal of Social History, 41(3), 717–736. Vicente Valentín, M. (1994). Mujeres artesanas en la Barcelona moderna. In I. Pérez Molina (Ed.), Las mujeres en el Antiguo Régimen. Imagen y realidad (s. XVI–XVIII) (pp. 57–90). Barcelona: Icaria.

6 Agency and Capabilities: North Versus South?

The pillars of early modern historiography—globalisation, the modern State, religious reforms, the dissemination of literacy, capitalism, the Industrial Revolution and so on—can be examined in relation to the role of women in the economy, and our point of view can vary greatly if we consider the effects of ‘the grand narratives’ on women, their social conditions and their economic activities, or if we do in fact include women as an active part of ‘History’ and of its processes. In order to be an active part and to be able to exercise their own ‘agency’, women had to have the legal capacity to act upon and defend their own rights: it is precisely on this aspect that we will focus in the following pages. Economists in developing countries teach us that societies that do not grant women their rights produce less wealth and prosperity and develop more slowly (Sen 1999; Nussbaum 2000). How can society and economy function if the majority of the population is unable to act for itself legally? The landscape of women’s rights is not always predictable, nor is its developments, linked as they are to changes in the economy, society, culture and religion. We will now focus our attention on the particularly complex interweaving of family roles and economic rights and, in particular, on the differences and peculiarities of the law in various European contexts (Wunder 2009; Sperling and Kelly Wray 2010; Fontaine 2013). © The Author(s) 2018 A. Bellavitis, Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96541-3_6

69

70 

A. Bellavitis

It is not possible in this area, as in the others we intend to deal with throughout this book, to claim to be exhaustive; we will therefore focus on some particular cases, endeavouring above all to highlight what opportunities were offered to women by legal traditions which themselves varied greatly from one to another. The economic rights of women in past societies were not equal to those of men, not only in terms of hereditary and succession rights, but also in terms of the daily management of their own wealth and of the fruits of their labour. In many Italian cities, to be able to sign a notarial act, women—regardless of their marital status—required a guardian, or a mundualdus, a figure derived from Lombard laws (Feci 2004). This was not the case in cities with ancient maritime traditions, such as Genoa and Venice, where the frequent absences of men, namely sailors, traders and fishermen, gave women the opportunity to take on greater responsibility before the law. The contradiction between the misogynist and patriarchal ideal that drove many past (and many present…) societies and the actual needs of daily life has clearly emerged from the study of early modern legal and notarial acts. In Rome as in Tours, in London as in Rouen, the acts of judicial practice adapted the dictates of the law to the needs of society and economy, anticipating at times their subsequent developments. In Rome, “women’s obligation to provide their relatives’ (or the latters’ executor’s) consent and a judge’s decree” was introduced “very gradually” (Feci 2004: 102), and “the fact that, in the sixteenth-century, some dying husbands allowed their wives to choose their executors, suggests a perhaps more symbolic than actual guardianship” (Groppi 1996: 150). Research on the guardianship of unmarried women in Holland and Sweden confirms this picture, although there were, of course, also cases where the presence of a guardian served to steer or change the decisions of the women in their care and, in any case, from a symbolic point of view, this was a matter of reiterating women were inferior and irresponsible beings. The notarial acts themselves adapted the written law to the realities of daily life, sometimes anticipating future legislative developments, or fitting in the gaps of the law. For example, the eighteenth-century notarial registers of the city of Tours contain some acts that are in flagrant contradiction of customary laws, such as reciprocal donations between women—theoretically allowed only between spouses to resolve problems

  Agency and Capabilities: North Versus South? 

71

of succession. They also reveal the importance of over-age, unmarried women’s economic activities, a group of people totally ignored by the customary laws of the region, which merely specified that, upon marriage, women would move from their fathers’ to their husbands’ authority. The absence of laws on unmarried women, considered “an aberration” at the time of the drafting of the city statutes in the fifteenth century, three centuries later (but probably even before) actually allowed these women to sign purchase and sale deeds and apprenticeship contracts in the same way as men (Drouault 2010). In some particular contexts, and especially in cases of absence by their husbands, wives could take on much greater responsibility, as can be gleaned from the registers of notaries of the Portuguese town of Vila do Conde. Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, around a third of notarial deeds had women as signatories and, out of these, around a third were married, 75 per cent of them to sailors or ship’s captains. These acts related to their working activities, such as apprenticeship contracts or partnerships in maritime enterprises, but also to the management of movable and fixed assets and to lending activities (Polónia 2009). The freedom people had to manage their own assets varied throughout their lives. In the European regions where family relationships were regulated by customary laws, the emancipation of sons from their fathers occurred when they came of age, usually around the age of 25 or when they married. These elements of family law must be seen together with the fact that apprentices, who were subject to the authority of their masters, and often lived with them, were generally not allowed to marry. On the contrary, either by law or in practice, master craftsmen were very often married and heads of their families. On the other hand, in the Italian States of the early modern age, the emancipation of sons, with their consequent freedom to manage their own assets, only occurred upon their fathers’ death. In craftsmen’s families, then, notarial acts of emancipation were usually resorted to by young men who feared becoming responsible for the debts of their fathers or brothers (Cavallo 2009). Marital status and roles within one’s family certainly determined the men’s working activities and their freedom to manage their own assets. However, in the case of women, these aspects had even greater importance and far more significant consequences.

72 

A. Bellavitis

In English common law, married women lost title to all property, which became their husbands’. This also meant that earnings derived from working activities did not belong to them, unless they resorted to the status of feme sole, which sanctioned the separation of assets between spouses and a wife’s right to carry out a different working activity from her husband’s. This proves what we stated above, that is the need to make some room for women’s activities in order to ensure the good functioning of any economy. At the same time, this raises an issue of far wider scope— the consequences of personal responsibility—which in turn raises a largely rhetorical question: was it to allow their women more autonomy, or not to have to deal with their economic problems, in cases of bankruptcy or debt, that English husbands granted their wives the freedom to act as femes soles? (Erickson 1993; McIntosh 2005; Barker 2006). In the 1419 Liber Albus of London customary law, when a married woman (feme coverte) carried out a commercial activity on her own “as an unmarried woman”, she had to be considered as such for all aspects concerning her work. Therefore, a married woman who defaulted on the rent of the house or shop where she carried out an economic activity independent of her husband’s was legally prosecuted for her debts, despite being under coverture, or marital authority. At that time, married women who carried out a commercial activity had to register with their local authorities or publically declare their intention to trade alone. In the early modern age, a public act was no longer necessary, but it was assumed that a female merchant would be considered a feme sole, even if she was married. In the cases of femes covertes, the responsibility for their debts fell to their husbands, whereas a feme sole was personally responsible for her debts (Erickson 1993). During the eighteenth century, many legal treatises on coverture and feme sole were published; their purpose seemed to be to explain to women how to protect their assets, in the context of a proliferation of laws and legal institutions typical of England. Indeed, subjects could choose between different courts; that is, between common-law courts, equity courts, founded on the principles of ‘natural justice’, the local, or borough courts, which applied laws predating the Norman conquest, and ecclesiastical courts. Therefore, declaring oneself feme coverte and appealing to common law as applied by the court of the Lord Mayor of London

  Agency and Capabilities: North Versus South? 

73

could be a strategy employed by women accused of defaulting on their debts. The legal multiplicity that characterised early modern England could, in other words, prove to be an effective weapon for the most legally vulnerable individuals. In the first instance, married women turned to the local courts, which they could access quickly and cheaply and which recognised the status of feme sole. However, when the cause was lost or was at risk of being so, it was more convenient to appeal to their coverture, and turn to the high court of common law. As a last resort, equity courts judged cases on the basis of ‘natural justice’, or by mitigating certain strictures of common law on a case-by-case basis. Courts offered the quickest solutions, and being more disposed to listen to both sides, they were sometimes used as an intermediate stage for settling disputes. Over-age, unmarried women, on the other hand, and widows had complete freedom to dispose of their own assets. Widows, however, were penalised by sixteenth-century changes in inheritance laws, which limited their rights to their husbands’ inheritances (Erickson 1993, 1999). English common law had much in common with the customary laws of Normandy, which were perhaps the most restrictive in terms of women’s rights of all French customary laws. Even in Normandy, however, a married woman was allowed, subject to her husband’s authorisation, to carry out working activities as a “merchant in the public domain” (marchande publique), a title equivalent to the English feme sole that allowed a woman to produce, manage, sell, buy, borrow or lend money, and bring a law suit. The condition of marchande publique was common in other French and European cities, but took on particular significance in the case of Normandy, whose capital, Rouen, had had exclusively female guilds managed by mistresses since the Middle Ages. Each mistress was legally responsible for the actions of the guild as a whole, and voted during general meetings to set admission fees, accept the enrolment of those who had done the masterpiece established by the rules, approve taxes imposed by the state, and decide on the confiscation of goods or ask for the arrest of artisans who worked without authorisation. This level of freedom must be seen in a legal context where married women were a legal minority who could do nothing without the consent of their ­husbands. Normandy’s legal system, by contemplating the legal possibility for wives to become marchandes publiques, allowed them to become

74 

A. Bellavitis

active protagonists in the economic life and to contribute effectively to their family economy. However, in case of difficulties and, in particular, if one of the spouses had accrued debts whilst running his or her business, the creditors could always claim against the assets of the other. In France too, this matter was the subject of heated debates: according to some legal experts, husbands should not be held responsible for the debts of their wives, whereas women’s work was justified only if it could benefit their husbands and therefore, as a consequence, also their husbands’ creditors. The courts, however, often ruled in favour of the women and, whilst the marchandes publiques were absolved from having to pay their husbands’ debts, their husbands were held responsible for their wives’ debts (Lemonnier-Lesage 2005; Hafter 2007; Bellavitis et al. 2015). In what ways did women’s freedom to independently manage their own assets and women’s rights to property affect the economic development of their society? The question is certainly not an easy one, but some gender historians have attempted to answer it. Amy Louise Erickson has suggested a link between the capitalist development of the English economy and the lending, borrowing and investment activities of three population groups: over-age, unmarried women and widows who had successfully gained title to their husbands’ inheritances, and husbands who could freely access both their own and their wives’ assets. All together, they were a group of potential investors who were freer in their own enterprises than in other contexts, where unmarried women remained subject to their fathers’ authority and where husbands had a duty to protect their wives’ dowries (Erickson 2005). However paradoxical, this suggestion has the merit of introducing women, their freedom of economic agency and their assets into the ‘grand narrative’ of the development of capitalism. We can observe at least two differences with the situation of a big part of southern Europe, namely the disappearance of convents as a means to absorb the excess female population from the marital market and the fact that, in the dowry system based on Roman law, husbands managed their wives’ dowries, but did not own it and in fact had to undertake to return its equivalent value to their widows or their widows’ heirs. It is difficult to say, then, what part this situation may have played in slowing down or promoting any more or less capitalist economic development. What is certain is that the economic role of women, as investors and money-­

  Agency and Capabilities: North Versus South? 

75

lenders, has also been highlighted in the case of Southern Europe (Fontaine 2011; Petti Balbi and Guglielmotti 2012; Guzzetti 2012; Pompermaier 2018) and that, as we shall see, the legal and judicial procedures in matters of dowries, their inheritance and restitution were probably as complex as those for the avoidance of coverture or for to minimise its more crippling consequences for women and the economy. In the case of Flanders, Martha Howell has identified a link, in the period straddling the mediaeval and early modern ages, between the introduction of mechanisms for the protection of women’s assets, through the drawing up of notarial acts—marriage contracts and wills—and a general decline in the economic prosperity of the region. The joining of assets between spouses, typical of northern European customs, gave widows full control in the management of their family assets. When the finances of mercantile and artisan families began to suffer from a slowing of the economy and a downturn in social mobility, the problem of their widows managing the debts of the family workshop and the risk of being unable to leave their children anything in inheritance pushed craftsmen who were husbands and fathers to sign marriage contracts that kept assets between spouses separate and to draft wills that guaranteed an inheritance to their widows and children. Subsequently, customary laws were reformed in a way that had been anticipated by the initiative of individuals and families. In the past as it is today, therefore, legislation appears to be capable of responding to the needs of society, following its changes and development (Howell 1998). In England, too, the use of marriage contracts and wills, in the early modern age, was a way of circumventing the constraints of the laws on the succession rights of widows and to allow women greater control over their own assets (Erickson 1990). One of the most common means of ensuring that a husband’s mismanagement of the shared assets would not compromise the survival chances of his widow, if he died, was the separation of assets between spouses that, in most customary laws, in Holland as in Sweden or much of France, became shared ownership when the couple married (Schmidt 2010; Ågren 2000, 2011; Ågren and Erickson 2005: Béaur 2011). In Paris, the shared assets of the spouses were managed by the husband but many indications led historians to think that, in the families of the

76 

A. Bellavitis

“Nobles of the Gown” (noblesse de robe), wives had great freedom of initiative. This was also aided by the custom of matrilocality, that is, by the fact that newly weds would more often go to live with the wife’s family or close by. In practice, the management of households was often entrusted to competent and active women, which allowed their husbands to devote themselves entirely to their careers. However, in the case of financial disaster, brought on by spendthrift and irresponsible husbands, women, legally, had no say in the matter (Descimon 2009). It is for this reason that marriage contracts, common practice even among artisans in Paris during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, guaranteed the widows’ rights, whereas custom left much room for initiative and individual interpretation, not always working in their favour (Lanza 2003, 2007). A notarial act could be enough to sanction the separation of assets between spouses where customary laws required that they be shared: in these cases, husbands and wives were in perfect agreement as to the strategy to use, since requesting the separation of assets was precisely one way to save the assets of one spouse from falling into the hands of the creditors of the other. In other cases, which ended up in court, there were attempts, by women, to save their assets from the claims of a spendthrift and often violent husband. Before the judges, then, the women stressed their working and economic contributions to the welfare of their families and the witnesses who supported their requests denounced the ineptitude of their husbands in their trades and business (Hardwick 1998, 2006). Declarations like these, if there was still a need, highlight the contribution of wives to their families’ economy even in those cases, which are particularly difficult to document and quantify, where both spouses worked together in the same business. In the tradition of Roman law, dowries represented the share of paternal inheritance left to one’s daughters and they remained the property of wives, although they were managed by husbands. Succession from fathers to daughters took place therefore when they married, whereas sons received their inheritance upon the death of their fathers. However, fathers could have died before their sons married, and the dowries of daughters were often the sum of the bequests of various family members, in particular their mothers (Bellavitis 2001). In principle, a dowered daughter was not part of her father’s succession upon his death, but varia-

  Agency and Capabilities: North Versus South? 

77

tions were possible according to local custom; in Portugal, a daughter who had already received her dowry and was already married could still inherit assets upon her father’s death and, in Venice, a daughter who deemed that the dowry left for her was inadequate could request, before marriage, to be included in her father’s inheritance (Sperling 2010). Local customs, moreover, could even substantially change the traditions of Roman law: in some areas of Greece, for example, both men and women received a “dowry” when they married. This was shared to provide for the needs of the couple and their legitimate children (Kasdagli 2013). Wives were of course under marital authority, but the juridical figure of the “merchant in the public domain” is attested also in Southern France and as a de facto status in Italy (Feci 2018; Clarke 2012). In sixteenth-­ century Venice, widows “enjoyed the same rights as men”, entered into commercial partnerships even if they were not involved in large business partnership. In 1574, Zuana, the widow of a quilt-maker entered into partnership with a weaver: she provided the company with the shop and a sign; he brought a capital of 200 ducats, took care of the business and had to “show his accounts to Zuana whenever she wishes to see them” (Fiorucci 2018: 221). Since a dowry could not be used to repay debts, in some cases it was advantageous to pass off, as dowries, assets that in fact were not, to try and protect one’s assets from the claims of creditors. Caterina Albertina, in her will, written in Rome in 1640, confessed that her dowry only totalled 25 ecus and that another document that said otherwise had “been written so that the creditors of my husband, the said Guarino, would not take away from our home the few small things there still were” (Ago 1996: 173; 1998). It was not always a case of false statements, as that spouses’ assets were not shared and that the dowry had to be guaranteed on the basis of precisely identified assets. When, in 1791, in Turin, the innkeeper Guglielmo Miglietti received a visit from a judiciary official charged with seizing his assets to repay old debts, his wife therefore had every right to refuse the injunction, because “furniture and effects” were “pledged in their entirety for her dowry and all due to her for a value of 1073 lire and 15 soldi as stated in her marriage contract dated 3 December 1781” (Zucca Micheletto 2015). In Jewish families, tying up assets in the women’s dowries was the best way of defending the family’s resources from ever-looming external threats, whether they came

78 

A. Bellavitis

from individuals or from the State (Allegra 1996). In the families of the nobility, dowry and fideicommissum (entail) were two complementary strategies. Preventing the disposal of fixed assets in future generations, freezing them with the fideicommissum procedure or promising a very large dowry in a marriage contract, which may never be paid at all, meant protecting the equivalent sum from the claims of creditors (Lanaro 2010). In the Italian mercantile cities, dowries were invested in the husbands’ merchant companies, even though it was rare indeed for wives to participate in commercial activities. Sometimes it did happen, though, as can be gleaned from the 1535 will of Jacopo Bernardi from Lucca, which mentions the dowry his wife Camilla Guinigi had brought to their marriage, but also assets, objects and money earned by her, and acquired through her activity as a merchant (Berengo 1965: 42). In his will, from 1507, the Venetian merchant Alberto Grifalconi specified that the capital of his trading company included 3000 ducats from his sister-in-law’s dowry and, in 1566, the glassmaker Francesco Bortolussi, from Murano, in his will, urged his wife Elisabetta to go and live with his brothers who would continue to run the family business and not to demand the return of her dowry whilst she was still living with them. To avoid having to return a dowry to their widows or their families, husbands from the upper classes, in their wills, would often encourage their wives to remain at home as a donna et madonna (woman and lady) and not remarry (Bellavitis 2001: 128, 270). In families of craftsmen and small traders, a wife’s dowry could represent the necessary capital to start a business and could also be a lifeline to turn to in difficult times. In the sixteenth century, many daughters of textile workers from Florence and Lucca brought a loom as a dowry: this was a vital asset to set up a workshop. Amongst spinners from Genoa, it was often the wives’ assets that were offered as the guarantee requested by entrepreneurs for the delivery of raw materials (Groppi 1996: 147). In her will from 1550, the wife of a Venetian wool worker declared she had brought a dowry of “two hundred ducats, a hundred in goods and a ­hundred in wool, the wool given in place of money”.1 The obligation to keep capital in reserve for the return of a dowry could, however, put the brakes on economic investments. This is the reason why certain legal mechanisms allowed for the release of dowries in case of financial difficul-

  Agency and Capabilities: North Versus South? 

79

ties, or when there was a wish to make investments or to carry out migratory projects (Zucca Micheletto 2011; Cuccia 2014). Very often it was the families of craftsmen or small traders who resorted to the legal procedure known as alienazione dotale (transfer of dowry) to acquire a workshop, improve its equipment, purchase wholesale goods or to pay debts of various kinds. For example, in Turin, in 1770, husband and wife Anna and Michele Gilletto, sellers of fruit and vegetables in a city market, cashed in 300 lire from her dowry and immediately used them to pay for a consignment of vegetables that they had bought on credit from the monastery of the Consolata. In January 1775, Giuseppe and Maria Fraudone used 200 lire from her dowry to set up a haberdashery shop and, a few months later, Giuseppe and Teresa Grosso, innkeepers, paid a debt for a delivery of wine with 200 lire coming from her dowry through the alienazione dotale (Zucca Micheletto 2014a, b). We have so far considered the marital dowry as an inheritance, but what happened when there was no inheritance available? Strictly speaking, such a problem should not even have arisen and marriages would go ahead even in the absence of a dowry. This was certainly the case, in practice, but not in theory, as a dowry was necessary to celebrate weddings, since it served to defray the expenses of the married state (ad sustinenda onera matrimonii). Young women, therefore, had to somehow gather the necessary sum by working: domestic work, which many girls, very often immigrants, were engaged in, and crafts, performed in master craftsmen’s and craftswomen’s workshops, and frequently, thanks to apprenticeship contracts which, as we shall see, were in practice contracts of poorly paid employment which was only paid on completion. Similarly, the salaries of domestic workers were very often paid when they got married and, in fact, represented their dowry. In marriage contracts, brides sometimes declared with obvious pride they had earned their dowries from the sweat of their brows. In 1750, Ricca Lattes, from Turin, claimed she had earned the 1550 lire of her dowry by herself “over many years from her sweat, hardship, hard work and labour” and that nothing “came from her parents, or any of her brothers and relatives”, and for this reason she left everything to her husband and nothing to her relatives. In a similar fashion, Consolina Lattes, investing her dowry in the furniture, which her husband’s home did not have, clarified that “such money, furniture and

80 

A. Bellavitis

objects were her possession, and she had provided them with the money earned by serving in the house of signor Isachia Pescarolo for many years” (Allegra 1996: 182–183). Contrary to what has been said (De Moor and Van Zanden 2010), the dowry system did not allow women to remain idle in the expectation that their family of origin would pay their dowries, but the girls whose families were unable to provide one had to earn it through their own work. This could take a considerably long time, as can be gleaned from the marriage contract of a labourer from Lyon married in 1787. She had had to work for 24 years in silk manufacturing to be able to put together a dowry of 600 livres and, it seems, had not learned to read or write, given that she did not sign her marriage contract (Garden 1970: 220). For Venetian domestic workers the wait was long too: in the sixteenth century, it would take at least 20 years to manage to raise a dowry solely from the fruits of one’s labour (Romano 1996). Many domestic workers ended up remaining unmarried, unless they could rely on the help of one of the many charitable institutions that sprung up in mediaeval and early modern Italy with the aim of providing dowries for poor girls. The problem would then be of a different nature, since it was necessary to prove one’s moral standing and honour in order to “deserve” the dowry provided by those institutions, but also to be in a position to create a social network allowing them to access such resources (Chabot and Fornasari 1997; Fubini Leuzzi 1999). At the same time, in many cities in early modern Italy there were institutions that welcomed orphaned children and girls, or those finding themselves in vulnerable social and economic situations and considered at risk of losing their virtue or, as was said at the time, donzelle periclitanti (damsels in danger), where the girls worked to earn their dowries, and on which we shall return later when discussing apprenticeships (Groppi 1994; Terpstra 2005; Garbellotti 2006). As we have seen in the European regions where customary laws existed, in Italy too, marriage contracts and wills were used to adapt the written law to the specific needs of individuals and families. In the Venetian working classes, marriage contracts often included a contribution from the husbands called a controdote (counter-dowry), which was added to the dowries provided by the women, with the aim of improving their

  Agency and Capabilities: North Versus South? 

81

future lives should they be widowed. The wills of craftsmen and craftswomen usually named their spouses as heirs, rather than the families of origin, as was more often the case in the higher social classes. It is clear that the assets that could be left as one’s inheritance for the most did not come from one’s agnates, but were the fruits of the labours of individuals, undertaken in common, in family businesses, or individually. Wives would then leave their husbands the dowries they had “brought to the home”, by means of a formula that effectively expressed that it was vital capital to the family as a whole.2 The separation of assets between husbands and wives, the fact that wives retained the ownership of their dowries and the provision for their return in case of widowhood, were guarantees that could be very effective to avoid some of the consequences of the customary systems previously examined, and particularly the fact that husbands could dispose of their wives’, as well as the couples’ assets, as they pleased. On the other hand, women who deemed their husbands were badly managing their dowries could appeal to specific judicial magistrates for their restitution (Bellavitis 2008). In the eighteenth century, two English intellectuals who were engaged in the issue of women’s rights, Mary Astell (1666–1731) and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762), considered the Italian system to be greatly enviable, because, in contrast to England, wives at least retained the ownership of their dowries. What were the effects on the general development of the economy of the paternal control of non-emancipated young men and unmarried women, and of the existence of mechanisms to protect women’s assets? Certainly, we cannot say, as has already been noted, that the difference consisted of a greater development of individualism, of an ­entrepreneurial spirit and of female empowerment in the north-western European regions, because girls left their families to earn their living at an early age, whereas, in Mediterranean Europe, young girls stayed at home waiting passively for their dowries. There is still much to do and comparative research, on a European scale, on women’s rights and the connection between economic development, family roles and individual rights is one of the most interesting challenges in women’s history, a challenge directly linked to some of the burning issues in the contemporary world (Bellavitis and Zucca Micheletto 2018).

82 

A. Bellavitis

Notes 1. ASVE: NT (Venice State Archives: Notaries, Last wills), b. 780, 13 July 1550. 2. ASVE: NT (Venice State Archives: Notaries, Last wills), b. 782, n. 818, 14 September 1550.

References Ago, R. (1996). Oltre la dote: i beni femminili. In A. Groppi (Ed.), Il lavoro delle donne (pp. 164–182). Rome: Laterza. Ago, R. (1998). Universel/particulier: femmes et droits de propriété (Rome, XVIIe siècle). Clio. Histoire‚ femmes et sociétés, 7, 101–116. Ågren, M. (2000). Contracts for the Old or Gifts for the Young? On the Use of Wills in Early Modern Sweden. Scandinavian Journal of History, 25, 197–218. Ågren, M. (2011). For Better for Worse. Swedish Marriage and Property Law in a Comparative Perspective. In A. Bellavitis & I. Chabot (Eds.), La justice des familles. Autour de la transmission des biens, des savoirs et des pouvoirs (Europe, Nouveau monde, XIIe–XIXe siècle) (pp.  11–28). Rome: École française de Rome. Ågren, M., & Erickson, A. L. (2005). The Marital Economy in Scandinavia and Britain, 1400–1900. Aldershot/Burlington: Ashgate. Allegra, L. (1996). Identità in bilico. Il ghetto ebraico di Torino nel Settecento. Torino: Zamorani. Barker, H. (2006). The Business of Women. Female Enterprise and Urban Development in Northern England, 1760–1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Béaur, G. (Ed.). (2011). Le contrat de mariage. Special Issue of Annales de Démographie Historique, 121, 1. Bellavitis, A. (2001). Identité, mariage, mobilité sociale. Citoyennes et citoyens à Venise au XVIe siècle. Rome: École Française de Rome. Bellavitis, A. (2008). Famille, genre, transmission à Venise au XVIe siècle. Rome: École Française de Rome. Bellavitis, A., & Zucca Micheletto, B. (Eds.). (2018). Gender, Law and Economic Well-Being in Europe from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century. North Versus South? London/New York: Routledge.

  Agency and Capabilities: North Versus South? 

83

Bellavitis, A., Jourdain, V., Lemonnier-Lesage, V., & Zucca Micheletto, B. (Eds.). (2015). «Tout ce qu’elle saura et pourra faire». Femmes, droits, travail en Normandie du Moyen Âge à la Grande guerre. Mont-Saint-Aignan: PURH. Berengo, M. (1965). Nobili e mercanti nella Lucca del Cinquecento. Torino: Einaudi. Cavallo, S. (2009). Le emancipazioni. Una fonte per lo studio dei rapporti famigliari intra e inter-generazionali. In A. Bellavitis & I. Chabot (Eds.), Famiglie e poteri in Italia tra medioevo ed età moderna (pp.  347–370). Rome: École Française de Rome. Chabot, I., & Fornasari, M. (1997). L’economia della carità. Le doti del Monte di Pietà di Bologna (secoli XVI–XX). Bologna: il Mulino. Clarke, P. (2012). Le ‘mercantesse’ di Venezia nei secoli XIV e XV. Archivio Veneto, 3, 67–84. Cuccia, A. M. (2014). Lo scrigno di famiglia. La dote a Torino nel Settecento. Pisa: Pisa University Press. De Moor, T., & van Zanden, J. L. (2010). Girl Power: The European Marriage Pattern and Labour Markets in the North Sea Region in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period. The Economic History Review, 63(1), 1–33. Descimon, R. (2009). La fortune des Parisiennes: l’exercice féminin de la transmission (XVIe–XVIIe siècle). In S.  Cavaciocchi (Ed.), La famiglia nell’economia europea, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studio della Fondazione Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F.  Datini di Prato (pp. 619–634). Florence: Firenze University Press. Drouault, C. (2010). Aller chez le notaire: un moyen d’expression pour les femmes? L’exemple de Tours au XVIIIe siècle. Genre & Histoire, 6. https:// genrehistoire.revues.org/1023 Erickson, A. M. (1990). Common Law Versus Common Practice: The Use of Marriage Settlements in Early Modern England. The Economic History Review, s. II, XLIII(1), 21–39. Erickson, A. M. (1993). Women and Property in Early Modern England. London/ New York: Routledge. Erickson, A. M. (1999). Property and Widowhood in England 1660–1840. In S. Cavallo & L. Warner (Eds.), Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (pp. 145–163). London: Longman. Erickson, A. M. (2005). Coverture and capitalism. History Workshop Journal, 59, 1–16. Feci, S. (2004). Pesci fuor d’acqua. Donne a Roma in età moderna: diritti e patrimoni. Rome: Viella.

84 

A. Bellavitis

Feci, S. (2018). Exceptional Women: Female Merchants and Working Women in Italy in the Early Modern Period. In A. Bellavitis & B. Zucca Micheletto (Eds.), Gender, Law and Economic Well-Being in Europe from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century. North Versus South? (pp. 62–76). London/New York: Routledge. Fiorucci, E. (2018). Women at Work in a Southern European Town: Women, Guilds and Commercial Partnerships in Sixteenth Century Venice. In A. Bellavitis & B. Zucca Micheletto (Eds.), Gender, Law and Economic Well-­ Being in Europe from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries: North vs South? (pp. 215–227). London: Routledge. Fontaine, L. (2011). Il posto delle donne nella piccola economia finanziaria in Europa, in età moderna. Quaderni Storici, 2, 513–532. Fontaine, L. (2013). Makeshift, Women and Capabilities in Preindustrial European Towns. In D. Simonton & A. Montenach (Eds.), Female Agency in the Urban Economy. Gender in European Towns, 1640–1830 (pp.  56–72). New York/London: Routledge. Fubini Leuzzi, M. (1999). “Condurre a onore”. Famiglia, matrimonio e assistenza dotale a Firenze in Età moderna. Florence: Olschki. Garbellotti, M. (2006). Le risorse dei poveri. Carità e tutela della salute nel principato vescovile di Trento in età moderna. Bologna: il Mulino. Garden, M. (1970). Lyon et les Lyonnais au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Groppi, A. (1994). I conservatori della virtù. Donne recluse nella Roma dei Papi. Rome/Bari: Laterza. Groppi, A. (1996). Lavoro e proprietà delle donne in età moderna. In A. Groppi (Ed.), Il lavoro delle donne (pp. 119–163). Rome/Bari: Laterza. Guzzetti, L. (2012). Gli investimenti delle donne veneziane nel Medioevo. Archivio Veneto, 3, 41–66. Hafter, D. (2007). Women and Work in Preindustrial France. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Hardwick, J. (1998). Seeking Separations: Gender, Marriages, and Household Economies in Early Modern France. French Historical Studies, 21(1), 157–180. Hardwick, J. (2006). Early Modern Perspectives on the Long History of Domestic Violence: The Case of Seventeenth-Century France. The Journal of Modern History, 78(1), 1–36. Howell, M. C. (1998). The Marriage Exchange. Property, Social Place and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300–1500. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.

  Agency and Capabilities: North Versus South? 

85

Kasdagli, A. E. (2013). Custom and Law in the Early Modern Aegean Islands: The Case of Marriage Payments. In K. Gottschalk (Ed.), Gender Difference in European Legal Cultures. Historical Perspectives (pp.  127–137). Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Lanaro, P. (2010). La restituzione della dote. Il gioco ambiguo della stima tra beni mobili e beni immobili (Venezia tra Cinque e Settecento). Quaderni Storici, 135, XLV(3), 753–778. Lanza, J.  M. (2003). Les veuves d’artisans dans le Paris du XVIIIe siècle. In N.  Pellegrin & C.  H. Winn (Eds.), Veufs, veuves et veuvage dans la France d’Ancien Régime, Actes du Colloque de Poitiers, 11-12 juin 1998 (pp. 109–120). Paris: Honoré Champion. Lanza, J. M. (2007). From Wives to Widows in Early Modern Paris. Aldershot: Ashgate. Lemonnier-Lesage, V. (2005). Le statut de la femme mariée dans la Normandie coutumière. Droit et pratiques dans la Généralité de Rouen. Clermont/Ferrand: Presses Universitaires de la Faculté de Droit de Clermont-Ferrand. McIntosh, M. K. (2005). The Benefits and Drawbacks of Femme Sole Status in England, 1300–1630. Journal of British Studies, 44(3), 410–438. Nussbaum, M. (2000). Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Petti Balbi, G., & Guglielmotti, P. (Eds.). (2012). Dare credito alle donne nell’Europa medievale e moderna. Asti: Centro Studi Renato Bordone sui Lombardi, sul credito e sulla banca. Polónia, A. (2009). Women’s Participation in Labour and Business in the European Maritime Societies in the Early Modern Period. A Case Study (Portugal, 16th Century). In S. Cavaciocchi (Ed.), La famiglia nell’economia europea, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studio della Fondazione Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (pp. 705–719). Florence: Firenze University Press. Pompermaier, M. (2018). Women and Credit in Eighteenth-Century Venice: A Preliminary Analysis. In A. Bellavitis & B. Zucca Micheletto (Eds.), Gender, Law and Economic Well-Being in Europe from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries: North vs South? (pp. 183–199). London: Routledge. Romano, D. (1996). Housecraft and Statecraft: Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice, 1400–1600. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Schmidt, A. (2010). Generous Provisions or Legitimate Shares? Widows and the Transfer of Property in 17th Century Holland. The History of the Family, 15(1), 13–24.

86 

A. Bellavitis

Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sperling, J. G. (2010). Marriage, Kinship and Property in Portuguese Testaments (1649–1650). In J. G. Sperling & S. Kelly Wray (Eds.), Across the Religious Divide. Women, Property, and Law in the Wider Mediterranean (ca. 1300–1800) (pp. 158–174). New York/London: Routledge. Sperling, J.  G., & Kelly Wray, S. (Eds.). (2010). Across the Religious Divide. Women, Property, and Law in the Wider Mediterranean (ca. 1300–1800). New York/London: Routledge. Terpstra, N. (2005). Abandoned Children of the Italian Renaissance. Orphan Care in Florence and Bologna. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Wunder, H. (2009). Matrimonio e formazione del patrimonio nella prima età moderna. Un contributo sulla relazione tra la storia di genere e la storia economica. Studi Storici, 3, 747–778. Zucca Micheletto, B. (2011). À quoi sert la dot? Aliénations dotales, économie familiale et stratégies des couples à Turin au XVIIIe siècle. Annales de Démographie Historique, 1, 161–186. Zucca Micheletto, B. (2014a). Travail et propriété des femmes en temps de crise (Turin, XVIIIe siècle). Mont-Saint-Aignan: Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre. Zucca Micheletto, B. (2014b). Progetti migratori: lavoro e proprietà delle donne nelle migrazioni familiari dell’Italia preindustriale (Torino, XVIII secolo). Genesis, XIII(1), 31–48. Zucca Micheletto, B. (2015). Tra autonomia lavorativa e strategie familiari: le donne nel commercio al dettaglio a Torino in epoca moderna. In S. Cavaciocchi (Ed.), Il commercio al minuto. Domanda e offerta tra economia formale e informale, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studio della Fondazione Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F.  Datini di Prato (pp. 153–166). Florence: Firenze University Press.

7 The Right to Learn, the Right to Teach: Intellectual and Artistic Work as a Profession

A matter of fundamental importance for the history of work is, in all ages and societies, that of training. Carrying out any type of activity requires specific training, which can be received within the family, in educational or welfare institutions, or even in an apprenticeship relationship, which, in the past, involved in most cases the cohabitation of apprentices with their masters and their families. In the early modern age, young women and girls had very limited access to vocational training and, more generally, to school education. It must also be said that not all boys had access to education and training, which remained the privilege of a very small percentage of the population. There is no doubt that this was so, but there is no doubt that, in the case of women, this percentage was considerably lower despite the fact that in some cities, such as Venice, Florence or Paris, documents attesting the existence of female teachers and girls’ schools date back to the fourteenth century. In Verona, in 1545, there were 2 female teachers out of a total of 23 (9 per cent) and, in 1555, 5 out of 21 (25 per cent), aged between 18 and 87 years. None of the magistrae puellarum, or puerorum or female school teachers recorded in the Verona tax sources between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, around 20 in total, had similar job titles to the © The Author(s) 2018 A. Bellavitis, Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96541-3_7

87

88 

A. Bellavitis

male teachers’, whom the sources call either grammaticus or retoricus, and their tax records show rather low incomes. In the sixteenth century, male teachers paid between 8 and 10 soldi in taxes, grammarians between 10 and 15 and female teachers from 0 to 3, except the 45-year-old “Isabetta, teacher at the school for the poor”, who supported three daughters and a sister-in-law and who, in 1572, paid five soldi. In 1566, the Turin authorities ordered all teachers, including “female teachers who teach girls to read and sew”, to make a profession of faith. About 20 years later, Marieta opened a school in Venice, where she taught eight male and female pupils texts in the vernacular, Latin grammar and a little math: a ‘mixed’ private school was very unusual indeed. Nevertheless, in Venice, in 1586, about 26 per cent of boys aged between 6 and 15 were schooled, but only 0.2 per cent of girls (Grendler 1989). For much of the early modern age, the fact that it was right and necessary to give girls a school-based education was by no means a foregone conclusion. In the following pages, we will address the problem of the place of women in the world of female education and training in relation to work activities, but also to the opportunities for talented women to have a career and make a living from intellectual and artistic activities in European cities of the past. The question of girls’ education has been the subject of debate among European intellectuals since the Renaissance. Humanism, following Erasmus’ principle that: “man certainly is not born, but made man”, had focused on the education of children, but was primarily concerned, however, with the boys from the upper classes, destined to take on government roles in the civitas. Different voices had raised the issue since the beginning of the fifteenth century, including Christine de Pizan, who, in the Cité des Dames, had written that if women had had the opportunity to receive an education, they could have achieved the excellent results in the arts and in the sciences that men achieved. In 1525, Juan Luis Vives, tutor to Mary Tudor, Catherine of Aragon’s daughter and future Catholic Queen of England, in his treatise De institutione foeminae christianae, upheld the need to educate girls to read the Latin classics, but not to allow them to read short stories and poems, which might pollute their minds. However, Vives also wrote, it was not necessary to teach them the art of rhetoric, since the most beautiful virtue in a woman was silence.

  The Right to Learn, the Right to Teach: Intellectual and Artistic… 

89

Intellectual women, often educated by particularly open-minded parents, such as Isotta Nogarola (1418–1466) from Verona, Cassandra Fedele (1465–1558) from Venice, Margaret Roper (1505–1544), Thomas More’s daughter, or women from the French or English royal family, such as Margaret of Navarre (1492–1549) or the Queen Elizabeth I herself (1533–1603), stand out in the history of the European Renaissance and in some cases, especially in Italy, women were admitted to university lecture theatres as listeners or as teachers, even when they did not hold degrees. Women from the middle class, who had been educated at home, sometimes, as Moderata Fonte, the stage name of the Venetian Modesta da Pozzo (1555–1592), by having her brother repeat his lessons to her after he returned from school, expressed a high level of awareness of the difficulties of their status as women and were active participants in the so-called Querelle des femmes, that is the debate that, from the Renaissance, engaged many European intellectuals in long and detailed discussions, sometimes serious, sometimes facetious, about the respective values of men and women. Moderata Fonte, in the dialogue The worth of women, and Lucrezia Marinella (1571–1653), in the treatise The nobility and excellence of women, wrote about women’s education, too, stating that, had they had the opportunity to study, women would have surpassed men. The difficulty was not so much accepting the existence of exceptional women, who were generally said to be “equal to men”, but to spread culture among women and to recognise their intellectual and scientific merits with qualifications that could grant them a role in society. This is demonstrated by the fact that when, in 1678 in Padua, for the first time in Europe (and perhaps in the world), a university degree was conferred on a woman, the Venetian Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia (1646–1684), the magistrate of the Riformatori of the university of Padua ordered the University Rectors to always ask for their authorisation before accepting others: Your Excellencies will kindly make the tutors of the Colleges and other professors understand that they must not admit women of any condition to doctoral degrees, nor take steps that would lead to this end, without prior notice and agreement from our Magistrate. (Nadin 2014: 113)

90 

A. Bellavitis

But the debate was now out in the open and the advancements of the printing press and of vernacular languages certainly worked in favour of women’s access to education throughout Europe. But who would teach the girls? It was obviously preferable to entrust them to other women, therefore the debate on the education of girls quickly turned into a debate on the training of teachers too. One of the most authoritative “feminist” intellectuals, the French François Poullain de la Barre (1647–1725), wrote, in 1673, that if women had had access to university education, they could obtain degrees in theology, medicine and law as successfully as men did, and thus become excellent teachers (Ulivieri 1999). In addition to the economic and political contexts, even the religious one has had, and still has today, a decisive influence on the evolution of the role of women in different societies and on their right to receive an education and to achieve economic independence. In the Christian world, the most important religious change in the early modern period was the polarisation between a Protestant and a Catholic Europe. One of the consequences of the Protestant Reformation was the suppression of the female monasteries that had represented, and in Catholic Europe increasingly represented, an alternative ‘solution’ to marriage for girls too poor to marry and for the daughters ‘in excess’ in the matrimonial strategies of noble or bourgeois families. The monasteries were also, in mediaeval and early modern times, places of education and expression of female intellect, even though, within the walls of the cloister, few reached the levels of the Venetian Arcangela Tarabotti (1604–1652), who corresponded with spiritual libertine intellectuals in Italy and France, and the author of poignant and scathing texts on the fate that “the paternal tyranny” reserved for young women forced to take the monastic vows against their will. Sister Arcangela went so far as to accuse the “Reason of State” which, in an oligarchic system such as the Republic of Venice, used the forced monastic vows of daughters to limit births and avoid both the dispersal of family assets and any threats to the political cohesion of the patricians (Medioli 1990). In Protestant Europe, the suppression of monasteries was a liberation for many, and a leap into the unknown for others, accustomed to the protection/constraint of the cloister, to the extent that some nuns rebelled, succeeding in obtaining permission to remain in their convents until they

  The Right to Learn, the Right to Teach: Intellectual and Artistic… 

91

died. Some of them became governesses, like Joan Deane, a former nun who, in 1554, was employed as governess to the children of Sir George Gifford of Middle Clayden Buckinghamshire (Hill 2001: 55). For a long time, the convent model remained a point of reference even in Protestant areas, as evidenced by the story of the English Ladies, a female religious congregation founded by Mary Ward (1585–1645) to train female teachers, following the example of Jesuit colleges. The experiment was strongly opposed by Pope Urban VIII who dissolved the congregation in 1631, alleging that, under the guise of teaching, the English Ladies dealt with matters totally unsuitable “to their sex”, and despite the fact that theirs had clearly been an attempt to contribute to bringing England back to Catholicism (Evangelisti 2006). At the end of the seventeenth century, Mary Astell proposed the establishment of female universities for women who did not want to marry, a very clear allusion to convent-like institutions, in a country which had long since abolished the monasteries. In the long run, however, the abolition of female monasteries represented a true ‘revolution’, as it made it necessary to find an alternative, which could only be work, to allow unmarried girls from the middle and noble classes to support themselves: English governesses and nannies, forerunners of Mary Poppins, can also be explained in this way. In eighteenth-century England, never-married women could find a job that would provide them with independence turning to the new and expanding field of female education. Boarding schools that sprang up in English cities were often run by sisters, like the popular boarding school run by the Misses Sophia, Harriet and Ann Lee in Bath, or by two women together, like the boarding school run in 1764, in Leeds, by a Miss Robinson and a Miss Steel (Froide 2005). Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), too, was a lady’s companion, a teacher and a governess, before becoming a journalist and the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). In the eighteenth century, the average salary of a governess of noble birth, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, was about £20–30 a year, but could go up to 100 for those who could teach French. Tutors who, unlike governesses, were not given accommodation, earned an average of £84 a year teaching an hour a day, whereas governesses who took care of the children only during the day earned as little as £24 (Hill 2001: 61).

92 

A. Bellavitis

In the sixteenth century, in the Holy Roman Empire, the need to allow all churchgoers direct access to the Holy Scriptures, the pillar of the Protestant Reformation, was the reason behind the first attempts to make schooling compulsory but, despite the many rulings calling for the creation of girls’ primary schools, we do not know how many were actually opened. Moreover, Protestant discourse on the education of girls was no more progressive than the Catholic one. According to Johann Bugenhagen, Luther’s adviser on education, “young girls must only learn to read”, they must above all learn to pray and “to listen to the explanations of the ten commandments” and “of other sacred stories suitable to young girls, to practise their memory skills”; therefore, one or two years of schooling was more than enough for them, and in any case they did not need to spend more than one or two hours a day at school, because the rest of the day had to be devoted to repeating their lessons, but above all to helping their parents at home (Coudert 2005). In the Electorate of Saxony, in 1580, half the parishes had a German-­ language school for boys, but only 10 per cent had one for girls; in 1675, the figures were 94 per cent of parishes with boys’ primary schools and 40 per cent with girls’. In Southern Germany and Brandenburg, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the number of primary schools increased, but many were destroyed during the Thirty Years’ War. For girls, the model remained the one proposed a century earlier: one hour of lessons a day and only one or two years of schooling, where they learned to read, basic writing and math and above all to recite the catechism and the Psalms by heart. In Memmlingen, while the boys took part in Latin competitions, the best girl was chosen on the basis of her “great diligence and perseverance in the study of catechism, her modesty, obedience and excellent calligraphy”. The girls were mainly taught to do housework and to sew: the ordinances setting the qualities required of female teachers in the sixteenth century focused first and foremost on their integrity, then on their ability to teach domestic skills and, lastly, on their intellectual and subject-specific skills. In the countryside, the difference between the teaching of boys and girls was less marked: teachers were generally less competent, Latin was not taught and even school attendance was much less frequent (Wiesner 2008).

  The Right to Learn, the Right to Teach: Intellectual and Artistic… 

93

Both in Catholic and Protestant Europe, albeit in different ways, school education was part of the programmes of assistance to the poor. According to the Poor Laws in the English city of Norwich, in 1571, each of the four city guards had to employ as many women, choosing them carefully for their moral qualities, as nurses and teachers of poor children, who had to be housed in their homes, sometimes even together with their mothers. Each woman was responsible for between 6 and 12 pupils, whose work she had to supervise for six to eight hours a day, and whom she had to teach ‘letters’, for a salary of 20 shillings per year, a sum that must not have been very attractive if, in 1571 rules, it was felt necessary to clarify that women who refused employment could receive a prison sentence of at least 20 days. The education received from these establishments was certainly very limited and perhaps this was precisely what allowed it to spread widely: in 1630, the city decided to extend it to every parish. The city also paid a man and his wife to run the free school in St Giles Hospital, which welcomed 12 children. In the schools in English villages run by couples, the husbands usually taught the local boys to read and the wives taught the girls to sew (Willen 1988). In seventeenth-­ century England, on the initiative of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, free schools for the poor, managed by female teachers who had to be authorised by the Anglican bishops, spread more widely. In the early decades of the eighteenth century, a charity school female teacher was paid £25 a year and was given accommodation by the parish, but male teachers had salaries of up to £40 a year (Mendelson and Crawford 1998). In Catholic Europe, convents continued to educate girls from respectable families, according to rules which, following the Council of Trent, became increasingly rigid. In 1566, Carlo Borromeo, archbishop of Milan, issued new rules for the “secular girls” present “to be educated” in the convents, establishing that they should be aged between 10 and 15 years, observe the enclosure, pay at least 30 gold ecus and leave the convent after a year. Later, the minimum age was lowered to seven years and the boarders were allowed to stay at the convent longer, following a very simple learning programme: reading, writing, sewing and prayer. Few went further, partly because most nuns would not have been able to provide more complex tuition (Grendler 1989). Concern for the

94 

A. Bellavitis

e­ ducation of girls and a desire to train female teachers and missionaries led to the foundation of new religious orders from the early decades of the sixteenth century. One of the most important was that of the Ursulines: founded in Brescia by Angela Merici, it grew rapidly in France. It aimed to train future female teachers and also missionaries, a function in clear contradiction with the obligation of enclosure extended to all convents by the Council of Trent. This caused conflicts with the ecclesiastical hierarchy which resulted in disciplinary measures. The Ursuline boarding schools founded in the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza in the seventeenth century, however, were secular institutions, dependent on the ducal authority, which oversaw recruitment and the administration of temporal goods. The women who chose to live in these institutes and to devote themselves to the education of girls led a secluded life, sometimes taking vows in secret, so as not to fall under ecclesiastical jurisdiction and the obligation of enclosure. The Collegio di Sant’Orsola founded in Parma in 1623 was exclusively for young noble girls and if, in the early days, the education of boarders was limited to ‘reading, writing, working’, as well as, obviously, praying, in the eighteenth century the curriculum resembled the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits. The Ursulines’ College in Ferrara, founded at the end of the seventeenth century, was open to all girls of ‘respectable birth’, without requiring their nobility. Boarders had to pay a monthly fee of three ecus. The convents of Franciscan Tertiary Sisters, who were not a cloistered order and also grew in the period following the Council of Trent, also had primarily educational purpose. The Augustinians’ of Santa Chiara da Montefalco, in Ferrara, welcomed girls aged between 7 and 16, from all social classes, provided they did not have any contagious diseases. The pupils were divided into two classes, according to their ages, and had three hours of lessons in the morning and three in the afternoon in the summer and two in the morning and two in the afternoon in the winter months. The teachers were unpaid but could accept gifts. They were also not allowed to use corporal punishment (Zarri 2000). In France, various orders with an educational and missionary vocation were founded, such as the Congregation of Notre-Dame and the Visitandines, urban institutions which, like the Ursulines, welcomed mostly girls from the nobility and bourgeoisie as boarders, but also taught

  The Right to Learn, the Right to Teach: Intellectual and Artistic… 

95

poor girls living outside the convents. They were taught the rudiments of reading and writing, as well as housekeeping, sewing and “succeeding in all the honest arts that would be appropriate to a free and honourable woman”. During the seventeenth century, new institutions were founded: no longer religious orders, but secular female congregations, with a missionary and charitable vocation, aiming to spread a basic religious education through the villages and the countryside. It was a project aimed at the return of France to Catholicism that was incompatible with the cloistered orders. The same aim was declared, but on another level, by the École de Saint Cyr, founded in 1686 by Madame de Maintenon to educate 250 girls from impoverished noble families, following the tenets expressed in 1673 by François Fénelon in his treatise On the Education of Daughters. Its curriculum was much more complex: history, literature, Latin, music, painting and of course religion. The aim was training mothers and ladies who would live by and promote Catholic teachings, after the abolition of the Edict of Nantes (Chartier et al. 1976: 236). In the cities of early modern Europe there were women who earned their living as teachers, even though they had very rarely received any specific training. Most of the time, the concern of those who undertook the education of women was above all to educate young girls to be good Christian mothers. Even a pioneering school such as the Dottreskolen, founded in 1791 in Copenhagen, which gave girls a scientific education and mostly employed male teachers, actually aimed above all to train good merchants’ wives, able to keep their account books (Rogers 2006). Even today, despite the many changes and doubtless progress of the last decades, the presence of women at the highest levels of science and art is lower than men’s and even today a woman who excels in a scientific discipline makes the headlines. There are fewer women university professors than men, although there are more female university students and, in show business, women are more often actresses than directors. The examples could continue, but the situation is well known, and is regularly the subject of press reports or generally discussed in the media. The history of women’s intellectual endeavours is not the subject of this book, but, to the extent that individual talents can be displayed in professional and remunerated activities, I think it is useful to trace the main lines of

96 

A. Bellavitis

e­ volution of the role of women in some intellectual, scientific and artistic professions. Between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, examples of intellectual women, authors and poets are found throughout Europe. Sometimes, as in Italy and Spain, we even find them in university lecture theatres as lecturers, even though they did not hold a doctorate, or as learners, but hidden behind a curtain, as, in Leiden, Dutch philosopher Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678) was. History is studded with exceptional figures such as the English Margareth Cavendish (1623–1673), who has left us, as an appendix to her Observations upon experimental philosophy, a scientific utopia, the description of an ideal world where there was no difference between men and women and where women could have a leadership role in natural philosophy; or the French Emilie du Châtelet (1706–1749), translator and commentator of Newton’s Principia; or the first woman to obtain a chair in experimental physics, the Bolognese Laura Bassi Veratti (1711–1778). Her exceptional intellectual talents led her family to invest in her education, entrusting her to physician Gaetano Tacconi, who instructed her in the same disciplines followed at the University by her male counterparts: logic, metaphysics, physics and psychology. In 1732, the University of Bologna conferred upon her a degree, a lecturing position and the honorary chair of philosophy, with a salary of 500 lire. In 1745, she was granted the honorary title of Benedictine Academic by Pope Benedict XIV with an annual pension of 100 lire. In 1749 at home, together with her husband, she began to teach an experimental physics course for university students, which was recognised as being of public interest and remunerated with an annual salary of 1000 lire, one of the highest in the whole university. And yet, as she was a woman, this teaching had to be done at home, and not in public, at the Archiginnasio (Pomata 2002; Cavazza 2009; Robin 2013; Rankin 2013). Medicine, due to its hybrid nature of university scientific discipline, but also of practice based on family and daily experience, deserves a separate mention. We shall return later to the role of women in care and assistance activities, and in particular to the early modern developments of midwifery, on which women held their monopoly for a long time, despite the increasing opposition from official medicine and the surgeons’

  The Right to Learn, the Right to Teach: Intellectual and Artistic… 

97

guilds. Historical research has highlighted a process of exclusion of women from official medicine, linked to the establishment of universities and of the medical knowledge they taught. The trials brought by large institutions, such as the Sorbonne, or the London College of Physicians, against women who illegally practised medicine, testify to this evolution, but are at the same time evidence of how women continued, especially in the countryside, to practise medicine as a profession. The situation in the Italian states was more varied: we have evidence in the Middle Ages of women taking university courses in medicine, and, even in the early modern age, of university teaching positions entrusted to women. Family ties were crucial, as they were often doctors’ daughters or wives, such as Anna Morandi Manzolini (1719–1786), who worked extensively with her husband, a professor of anatomy at the University of Bologna, practising dissections and developing a particular expertise in the manufacture of anatomical wax models. In 1750, by then a widow, she was invited to give lectures in the school of obstetrics founded by Giovanni Galli and, ten years later, she was granted the chair of anatomy, as well as the job of wax ‘modeller’, with a salary of 300 lire a year. Manzolini was internationally renowned, an elected member of the Clementine Academy, the British Royal Society and the Russian Royal Scientific Association, and her wax models were purchased by Emperor Joseph II, London’s Royal Society, the King of Sardinia and the Republic of Venice. The international fame of the University attracted in Bologna students from all over Europe, including English noblewomen, such as Elisabeth Bury (1644–1720), who followed anatomy courses, practised medicine and left numerous writings with her “Critical observations” on anatomy, medicine, mathematics and music (Broomhall 2003; Whaley 2011). Intellectual work as such has been much more often practised by those who could afford it, as it was rarely a source of income, and if European history is studded with women of letters, writers and poets, it seems that the first English woman to live “of her pen” was Aphra Behn (1640–1689), a poet, author of theatrical texts, novelist, translator and even a spy for the king of England, well known for her adventurous and unconventional life. From the eighteenth century onwards, journalism, a burgeoning profession, gave educated women new work opportunities, even if for

98 

A. Bellavitis

a long time with a sort of ambiguity on the type of journalism suitable for, or rather, allowed to women. One of the earliest examples of women’s publications was the Female Tatler, a pro-tory satirical magazine, published in England by Delarivier Manley (1663 or 1670–1724). A pioneer of British political journalism, Manley was arrested for defamation and had to turn her newspaper into a periodical ‘for ladies’. Despite the support of an important man like Jonathan Swift, who entrusted her with the direction of the Examiner, in the last years of her life she had to give up writing political satire and, to earn a living, only cover issues considered appropriate to women, such as those we still expect to find in women’s magazines today. Even the Female Spectator (1744–1746), despite the best intentions of its director, Eliza Haywood, quickly became a newspaper ‘for ladies’. From its pages, however, as well as from Epistles for the Ladies (1749–1750), which she later directed, she always advocated the need for female education. These first periodicals directed by women sought, often successfully, to reconcile what society expected of them, and sold papers, with their personal views on the need to promote women’s causes, clearly also felt by some of the readers. The Quintessence des nouvelles historiques critiques politiques morales, published from 1711 to 1719 in Holland by an exiled French Protestant, Anne-Marguerite Petit Dunoyer (1663–1719), had great success: it addressed a diverse audience, curious about daily events and society gossip, but also interested in politics and current affairs. The female directors of the monthly Journal des Dames, published from 1759 to 1778, turned it into something more serious and engaged than a frivolous periodical for society ladies. The first, Madame de Beaumer (after 1700–1766), a Calvinist and probably a Free Mason, voiced sharp criticism against censorship and social injustice and in favour of female emancipation, a controversial stance that quickly caused her to fall foul of censorship, forcing her in 1763 to take refuge in the Netherlands. She entrusted her paper to Madame de Maisonneuve (?–1774?), who succeeded, by completely changing editorial policy and abandoning the controversial tone that had characterised the first season of the Journal des Dames, in securing a vast readership. She was granted a pension by the king and became a dangerous competitor to the most important French newspaper of the time, the Mercure Galant. At the end of the 1760s,

  The Right to Learn, the Right to Teach: Intellectual and Artistic… 

99

Madame de Maisonneuve made more and more room for articles of political criticism, and the newspaper had to close for a few years, until 1774, when Madame de Montanclos (1736–1812) took over its directorship. As ambitious and independent as Madame de Beaumer, but far more diplomatic and well known in court circles, while extolling women’s maternal role, following Rousseau’s philosophy, the new director upheld the right of women to have a career, bringing forth the example of Italian Laura Bassi who, precisely in those years, had been granted a degree in physics and a lectureship at the University of Bologna (Rattner Gelbart 1990). Even in Italy, women took up journalism, as well as editorial work: the first known name is Salomè Antonazzoni, a Venetian actress who, in Naples, in 1642, turned the handwritten gazette inherited from her husband into a printed newspaper, with royal privilege, publishing it until she died, in 1647. In Rome, in the early eighteenth century, the vast production of ‘notices’ and almanacs engaged female journalists like Caterina Chracas, daughter of one of the best-known printers in the city. She adopted a completely new approach, less tied to the curial circles, for the two newspapers inherited from her father. Caterina was active for 40 years, from 1723, taking care of the entire journalistic process: from writing the texts to the layout. The most important Italian female journalists of the eighteenth century, however, lived in Venice, the largest editorial centre in Italy. Elisabetta Caminer (1751–1796) learned her trade from her father Domenico, transcribing texts, learning English and French and collaborating in the drafting of the daily paper and the other newspapers he directed. She became a journalist who lived ‘from her pen’, corresponded with European scholars in French and certainly influenced the career of the other great Italian journalist of the time, her sister-in-law Gioseffa Cornoldi Caminer who, in 1786, started La donna galante ed erudita. Giornale dedicato al bel sesso (The noble and erudite woman. A newspaper devoted to the fair sex). In the first issue, presenting herself as a “woman of letters” and an academic from Arcadia, but without revealing her identity, she wrote: “I am a female. Whether I am beautiful or ugly, old or still worthy of human forgiving looks, whether I am wise or whimsical, you, critical observer, are neither good enough to judge nor to appreciate” (Strumia 2004; Plebani 2010). Both in France and in Italy,

100 

A. Bellavitis

the period of the French Revolution was a particularly happy moment for female journalism, even if of short duration: the first years of the Revolution in France and the three “Jacobine” years in Italy saw the success of female political journalists such as Louise de Kéralio and Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel (Veauvy and Pisano 1997). Painting deserves to be discussed separately, because it was at the same time an occupation for young ladies from respectable families, and therefore not intended to become a profession, but also a craft still handed down in the family, from father to daughter. During the early modern age, female painters able to “live from their brush” established themselves and were progressively welcomed by urban male institutions, craft guilds or Academies. In 1568, when writing about female artists, Giorgio Vasari did not stress their talent and artistic skills, but praised their morality, goodness, grace and beauty. About Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1532–1625), he wrote that she excelled in the art of drawing “like a man”. Women found it difficult to access apprenticeships with male artists and even more to be admitted to the Academies, which is why many learned the trade from their fathers, like Marietta Tintoretto (1554–1590), whose fame as a portrait artist crossed the borders of the Venetian Republic. She may have been a natural daughter of the well-known Venetian painter, who took care of her artistic education using non-conventional methods, such as getting her to dress up as a boy to allow her to follow him to his workshop, but he decided to keep her in Venice, refusing invitations extended to her by the Habsburgs and marrying her to a jeweller. Her sisters, Girolama and Lucrezia, were nuns, but also artists, in the ways allowed by their status. They embroidered on silk an altar cloth that reproduced Tintoretto’s Crucifixion with vivid colours and in exceptional detail. Their father was instrumental to the future destiny of his four daughters and Octavia, who, despite being married, always used exclusively her paternal surname, Robusti Tentoretta, in 1645 wrote in her will that, after being widowed, she had married “her house painter”, one Sebastiano Casser, “by order and commandment of my brethren Dominico and Marcho, who before they died made me promise that if I thought that Messer Sebastiano was good at painting, I should take him as a husband, so that with his virtue he may further the name of the Tentoretto household”. After being “undecided for several years”, having

  The Right to Learn, the Right to Teach: Intellectual and Artistic… 

101

“seen that in painting he is equal to any good painter and few are better in portraiture”, she resolved and “took him for husband”. It was a marriage “with reason” in view of a “team strategy” that did not yield the expected results, since there were no descendants of the Tintoretto household (Mazzucco 2009, 2014: 88). Catharina van Hemessen (c. 1528–1587), painter at the court of Mary of Hungary, and Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614) who, in her marriage contract, wrote that she would continue to paint even after her marriage, also came from artistic families. Fontana headed a workshop, first in Bologna and then in Rome, where she was welcomed at the Academy of St Luke and sold her paintings at high prices. In the seventeenth century, professional female artists began to dwindle throughout Europe. In Holland, Judith Leyster (1609–1660), a painter renowned for her scenes of daily life and still lifes and author of many of the paintings that until the nineteenth century had been attributed to the famous Dutch painter Franz Hals, aged just 20, was admitted to the guild of painters in Haarlem, where she kept her workshop. Mary Beale (1633–1699) was the most famous English female painter of the seventeenth century. She supported her family with her income as an artist, while her husband, in a perfect overturning of traditional roles, managed the workshop. The risks of apprenticeship are confirmed by the well-known story of Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1652/53) who, although a painter’s daughter, was raped by her father’s colleague in whose workshop she had been apprenticed to study perspective. This is a special case, not because it is unique (violence, even sexual violence, on apprentices was very frequent, as evidenced by the judicial sources), but because of the repercussions it had on Artemisia’s artistic expression of her subsequent career. The paintings of Susanna and the Elders and of Judith beheading Oloferne have in fact been interpreted in light of the violence suffered. The first woman to be admitted to the Drawing Academy in Florence, Artemisia Gentileschi had a notable international career, working for Charles I in England and importing Caravaggio’s style, which she was well known for, to Florence, Genoa and Naples. During the eighteenth century, female painters were increasingly numerous and their activity was recognised as a real job. Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750), enrolled in 1709  in Amsterdam’s Saint Luke’s guild,

102 

A. Bellavitis

worked at the court of the Elector Palatine in Düsseldorf; Angelica Kaufmann (1741–1807) was the first female professional painter in England to challenge the male monopoly on the representation of mythological and historical scenes and was a founding member of the Royal Academy in 1768; in Venice, Rosalba Carriera (1675–1757), of humble background and trained in painting outside her family environment, revolutionised the pastel portrait technique, obtaining recognition throughout Europe and was admitted, at the age of 30, to the Academies of Bologna and Paris; Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1755–1842), portrait artist at the court of Marie Antoinette, was the first woman to be admitted at the Royal Academy of painting and sculpture as a painter of allegories (Borzello 1998; Reynolds 2006; Lis and Soly 2012). The foundation, in the second half of the century, of art schools open to girls, helped to keep training separate from the family workshop, opening up new teaching opportunities for women (Truant 2015). In activities that put the body on a stage, such as theatre, singing, music and playing musical instruments, there was always a risk they would bring disgrace for women who practised them in public places, that is beyond the walls of their ancestral palaces, royal courts or monasteries. Also, it should not be forgotten that in some Italian cities, and above all in Rome, female roles in operas were for a long time played by castrati, a practice that was forbidden, in the Papal States, only at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, in the late Renaissance, some Italian courts were particularly ahead of their times. This is the case with Ferrara, where, in the last decades of the sixteenth century, Duke Alfonso II d’Este created an all-women singing group, who performed before a very select audience of members of the court and their guests. The Concerto delle donne was imitated in other Italian courts, such as in Mantua and Florence, and its reputation reached as far as France. The female singers and musicians were noble and cultured women and even court ladies, such as the poet Tarquinia Molza, originally from Modena. Female composers were rarer: the first woman whose secular compositions were credited with being printed was Maddalena Casulana (circa 1540–circa 1590). Her Il primo libro de’ madrigali a quattro voci (The first four-voices book of madrigals), published in 1568, opened with a dedication to Isabella de’ Medici, where, among other things, the need to show

  The Right to Learn, the Right to Teach: Intellectual and Artistic… 

103

“the vain error of men, who believe they are such masters of the gifts of the intellect that it seems to them they cannot exist in women to the same degree” was stated. Barbara Strozzi (1619–1667) was one of the most important Italian composers of the seventeenth century. She first worked with her father, a lawyer and a poet, who wrote the librettos set into music by his daughter. She published 125 pieces of vocal music, dedicating them to her various patrons, which included: Vittoria della Rovere, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I d’Asburgo and Eleonora Gonzaga-Nevers and even Anne of Austria. The protection of the powerful and the welcome of the courts allowed these musicians and composers to earn their living with their art, but they were not exempt from disapproval and scandals (Palumbo). In the female monasteries, musical and singing talents could find expression, even beyond religious music alone. Music and singing were so important that, where there were no particularly gifted nuns, good singers and organists were accepted even without a dowry, which was cause “of the greatest harm to the monasteries” in the eyes of contemporaries. Some convents trained singers who subsequently had a career in the Italian courts: Laura Bovio, a famous singer at the Gonzagas and Medici courts at the end of the sixteenth century, had been educated in music and singing in the monastery of San Lorenzo in Bologna (Zarri 2000: 168; Montford 2013). An interesting case, due to its relationship between training and work, is that of Venetian hospitals, institutions that took in orphaned girls, trained them to sing and had them perform at parties or visits by ambassadors and eminent foreign guests. The skills of the putte (girls) of the four main hospitals were well known beyond the borders of the Venetian Republic and even of Italy, and eminent visitors, such as Rousseau, described the extraordinary seductive power of the female voices emanating from behind the choir screens. In fact, the girls were not to be seen to avoid arousing desires in the listeners. Hospitals were the forerunners of modern conservatories, becoming accessible, during the eighteenth century, even to girls who were not orphans but were eager to learn the art of singing. Some putte had brilliant careers as singers and composers outside the institution, such as Maddalena Lombardini Sirmen (1745–1808) (Austern 2013; Giron Panel 2015).

104 

A. Bellavitis

If in the Italian states women were able to tread the boards earlier than in other countries, this was because the Commedia dell’Arte troupes realised that it would be easier and cheaper, rather than using men disguised as women, to exploit the seductive potential of the female body. The first Commedia dell’Arte actress whose name is known is Donna Lucrezia from Siena, who signed a company contract in Rome in October 1564, but she was certainly not the first. In 1567, in Mantua, there were at least two theatre companies: in one, a signora Flaminia acted, whereas the other was directed by Vicenza Armani (1530–1568), actress, improviser, author of madrigals and wax sculptress. The theatre stages saw the success of important actresses, such as Vittoria Piissimi, from Ferrara. From 1570 to 1578, she was the prima donna in one of the best-known troupes in Italy, the Gelosi, whom she later left to direct the Confidenti troupe. Isabella Andreini (1562–1604) was actress, poet and author of comedies staged in the most important Italian and French theatres by the Gelosi, which she directed. She died in childbirth, in Lyon, in 1604 and on her grave her husband wrote that she had been a pious woman and a faithful wife: it was obviously necessary to dispel the bad reputation of a theatre woman (Brunetti 2010). In the eighteenth century, Carlo Goldoni’s plays placed a new focus on female characters, making them the pivots of stage action, thanks to very important actresses, such as Caterina Bresciani (1722–1780), from Florence, who is considered the inspiration behind Goldoni’s “feminist breakthrough” in the 1760s (Alberti 2004; Scannapieco). From the end of the sixteenth century, actresses also began to appear in Spain and France, while in England, in Shakespeare’s times, female roles were played by boys, even if there were women among the itinerant musicians, acrobats and other performers. Women would only be allowed to perform theatrical roles in the seventeenth century, first at court, and, after the Restoration, in public theatres too. Queens Anne (1574–1619) and above all Henrietta Maria (1609–1669) acted with their court ladies and, in 1626, the word “actress” appeared in the English language for the first time, applied to the queen’s performance in a French pastoral drama. The influence of the European courts where the sovereigns had sought refuge during the revolutionary period, and in particular the French one, was certainly significant. Charles II, upon his return to England in 1660,

  The Right to Learn, the Right to Teach: Intellectual and Artistic… 

105

not only reopened the theatres immediately but also authorised the presence of actresses on the stage. Before the end of the seventeenth century, there are no traces in England of women being members of theatre companies, even if, as in the crafts guilds, widows could succeed their husband in the management of the company, as happened with Lady Davenant, who directed the Duke’s Company from the death of her husband in 1668, to her son’s coming of age, in 1673. The hiring contracts of married actresses were signed by their husbands, as in the case of John Verbruggen, who, in 1695, accepted a salary of £75 on his wife Susannah’s behalf. Even in this context, women’s wages were much lower than men’s: an experienced actor could be paid 50 shillings a week, whereas an actress did not earn more than 30. The most famous actress of the time, Elisabeth Barry, was paid 50 shillings a week, but her stage partner, Thomas Betterton, earned as much as £5. Elisabeth Barry’s career and financial success attracted criticism, as usual in the form of insinuations about her morality, accusing her of being a prostitute. In England, these accusations against all actresses, especially if unmarried, frequently came from puritan sources hostile to the court, but, as we have seen, such attacks were frequent and common everywhere (Howe 1992). Yet, that of an actress, as well as often being a family business, with husbands and wives with their sons and daughters all acting in the same company, was also a job that required specific training that could be acquired through apprenticeship contracts very similar to those used for other activities and could also involve young women from entirely respectable circles: two of the best-known French actresses of the early seventeenth century, Marie and Colombe Venière, were a lawyer’s daughters. The profession of actress could be the source of great wealth and career even in the past, but, in most cases, incomes were somewhat irregular. In the eighteenth century, Adam Smith wrote that the high fees charged by some actresses and opera singers were to be seen not only as a recognition of their talents, but also as a necessary compensation for the bad reputation that went with their occupation (Scott 2010). After this quick overview of the educational opportunities open to young women in the early modern age, we can see a slow but positive development towards improved literacy and a progressive acceptance of women’s presence in university lecture theatres, artistic academies and on

106 

A. Bellavitis

theatre stages. However, it is also clear there were different timeframes in this process, depending on the European countries and regions, and not always following the patterns that would seem more obvious to us. Papal Rome and Puritan London, for example, were united in forbidding women to perform on the stage, whereas in France, during the Enlightenment, an Italian woman was presented as a good example of an intellectual career, spent in a university in the Papal State.

References Alberti, C. (2004). Sette commedianti per Carlo Goldoni. In D. Perocco (Ed.), Donne e teatro (pp. 59–86). Venice: Ca’ Foscari. Austern, L. P. (2013). Women, Gender and Music. In A. Poska, J. Couchman, & K. A. McIver (Eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (pp. 509–532). Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate. Borzello, F. (1998). Femmes au miroir. Une histoire de l’autoportrait féminin. Paris: Thames & Hudson. Broomhall, S. (2003). Women’s Medical Care in Early Modern France. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Brunetti, B. (2010). Esordi del professionismo attorico femminile nella Commedia dell’arte. In S.  Chemotti (Ed.), Donne al lavoro (pp.  71–87). Padova: Il Poligrafo. Cavazza, M. (2009). Between Modesty and Spectacle. Women and Science in Eighteenth-Century Italy. In P.  Findlen, W.  Wassyng Roworth, & C.  M. Sama (Eds.), Italy Eighteenth’s Culture. Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour (pp. 275–302). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Chartier, R., Compère, M.  M., & Julia, D. (1976). L’éducation en France du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Sedes. Coudert, A. P. (2005). Educating Girls in Early Modern Europe and America. In A.  Classen (Ed.), Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (pp. 389–413). Berlin: De Gruyter. Evangelisti, S. (2006). Ricche e povere. Classi di religiose nelle comunità monastiche femminili tra Cinque e Seicento. In M.  Lanzinger & R.  Sarti (Eds.), Nubili e celibi tra scelta e costrizione (secoli XVI–XX) (pp. 37–48). Udine: Forum. Froide, A.  M. (2005). Never Married. Singlewomen in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Giron Panel, C. (2015). Musique et musiciennes à Venise. Histoire sociale des Ospedali. Rome: École Française de Rome.

  The Right to Learn, the Right to Teach: Intellectual and Artistic… 

107

Grendler, P.  F. (1989). Schooling in Renaissance Italy, Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600. Baltimore/London: The John Hopkins University Press. Hill, B. (2001). Women Alone. Spinsters in England, 1660–1850. New Haven/ London: Yale University Press. Howe, E. (1992). The First English Actresses. Women and Drama, 1660–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lis, C., & Soly, H. (2012). Worthy Efforts: Attitudes to Work and Workers in Preindustrial Europe. Leiden/Boston: Brill. Mazzucco, M. (2009). Jacomo Tintoretto & i suoi figli. Storia di una famiglia veneziana. Milan: Rizzoli. Mazzucco, M. (2014). Le Tintorette. Destini di donne nella Venezia del ’500. In A. Schiavon (ed. with the collaboration of P. Benussi), I meriti delle donne. Profili di arte e storia al femminile dai documenti dell’Archivio di Stato di Venezia (secoli XV–XVIII), Catalogo della mostra, Venezia, 6 marzo-6 giugno 2014 (pp. 83–89). Trieste: EUT. Medioli, F. (1990). L’inferno monacale di Arcangela Tarabotti. Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier. Mendelson, S., & Crawford, P. (1998). Women in Early Modern England 1550–1720. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Montford, K. (2013). Convent Music: An Examination. In A.  Poska, J.  Couchman, & K.  A. McIver (Eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (pp. 75–93). Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate. Nadin, L. (2014). Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia (1646–1684). Prima donna laureata nel mondo. In A. Schiavon (ed. with the collaboration of P. Benussi), I meriti delle donne. Profili di arte e storia al femminile dai documenti dell’Archivio di Stato di Venezia (secoli XV–XVIII), Catalogo della mostra, Venezia, 6 marzo-6 giugno 2014 (pp. 103–113). Trieste: EUT. Palumbo, V.  Barbara Strozzi. http://www.enciclopediadelledonne.it/biogra-e/ barbara-strozzi/ Plebani, T. (2010). Giornaliste: esperienze e percorsi all’esordio di una carriera femminile (XVII–XVIII). In S. Chemotti (Ed.), Donne al lavoro (pp. 89–113). Padova: Il Poligrafo. Pomata, G. (2002). Donne e Rivoluzione scientifica: verso un nuovo bilancio. In N. M. Filippini, T. Plebani, & A. Scattigno (Eds.), Corpi e storia. Donne e uomini dal mondo antico all’età contemporanea (pp. 165–191). Rome: Viella. Rankin, A. (2013). Women in Science and Medicine, 1400–1800. In A. Poska, K.  McIver, & J.  Couchman (Eds.), The Ashgate Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (pp. 407–421). Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate.

108 

A. Bellavitis

Rattner Gelbart, N. (1990). Le donne giornaliste e la stampa nel XVII e XVIII secolo. In G. Duby & M. Perrot (Eds.), Storia delle donne in Occidente, vol. 3, Dal Rinascimento all’età moderna, ed. by N.  Zemon Davis and A.  Farge (pp. 435–454). Rome/Bari: Laterza. (English edition: Female journalists. In G. Duby & M. Perrot (Eds.), History of Women in the West, vol. III, Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes ed. by N. Zemon Davis and A. Farge, translated by A. Goldhammer, pp. 420–443). Reynolds, S. (2006). Mistresses of Creation. Women as Producers and Consumers of Art Since 1700. In D. Simonton (Ed.), The Routledge History of Women in Europe since 1700 (pp. 341–379). London/New York: Routledge. Robin, D. (2013). Intellectual Women in Early Modern Europe. In A. Poska, J.  Couchman, & K.  A. McIver (Eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (pp.  381–406). Farnham/ Burlington: Ashgate. Rogers, R. (2006). Learning to Be Good Girls and Women: Education, Training and Schools. In D. Simonton (Ed.), The Routledge History of Women in Europe Since 1700 (pp. 93–133). London/New York: Routledge. Scannapieco, A. Caterina Bresciani, chi era costei? Tragicommedia in tre atti con un prologo ed un epilogo. http://www.drammaturgia.it Scott, V. (2010). Women on the Stage in Early Modern France, 1540–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strumia, E. (2004). Tra Lumi e Rivoluzione: i giornali per le donne nell’Italia del Settecento. In S. Franchini & S. Soldani (Eds.), Donne e giornalismo. Percorsi e presenze di una storia di genere (pp. 181–210). Milan: Franco Angeli. Truant, C. (2015). Many Exceptional Women: Female Artists in Old Regime Paris. In D. M. Hafter & N. Kushner (Eds.), Women and Work in Eighteenth-­ Century France (pp. 91–112). Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Ulivieri, S. (1999). Le bambine nella storia dell’educazione. Rome/Bari: Laterza. Veauvy, C., & Pisano, L. (1997). Paroles oubliées. Les femmes et la construction de l’État-nation en France et en Italie, 1789–1860. Paris: A. Colin. Whaley, L. (2011). Women and the Practice of Medical Care in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1800. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wiesner, M. E. (2008). Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Willen, D. (1988). Women in the Public Sphere in Early Modern England: The Case of the Urban Working Poor. Sixteenth Century Journal, 19(4), 559–575. Zarri, G. (2000). Recinti. Donne, clausura e matrimonio nella prima età moderna. Bologna: il Mulino.

Part II Women’s Jobs

8 Servants and Slaves

Serving, feeding, caring, giving birth and prostitution were activities predominantly or exclusively carried out by women, albeit with specific and varied timelines in different European contexts. These activities made use of the female body as a working tool, either on its own, as in the case of wet nurses, or as their main instrument, as in the case of prostitutes; they were activities carried out on female bodies, as practised by midwives, and which for a long time were performed only by women; or they were activities associated with traditional ‘feminine traits’, such as the ability to ‘care’ for others, which is still the basis of occupations such as nursing, home help and care work. These were activities that, despite having distinct gender connotations, were not always and exclusively performed by women, and occupations whose gender identity changed, significantly in some cases, during the early modern age. Serving others, taking care of their daily needs and living with one’s employers are features that make domestic service a unique occupation, in some respects ‘suitable’ for women, in others, however, particularly risky for them, as we shall see. In the early modern age, the percentage of male and female servants in the towns and countryside of Europe was rather high and is relatively easy to work out for historians, as population © The Author(s) 2018 A. Bellavitis, Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96541-3_8

111

112 

A. Bellavitis

censuses often contained a specific section for co-resident workers. As we will see, however, in the chapter on apprenticeship, it is often impossible to separate domestic care work from participation in production for the market, especially in craft families. By way of example, a Venetian law of 1579 stated that in the mirrors makers workshops there should not be more than four male workers, and that the female domestic servants (massare) could be included in that number.1 Domestic service has been studied in relation to inheritance systems since, in many rural areas of central and northern Europe, land was left to just one child while the others left their families to work as domestic servants on other farms or in cities. Moreover, even in craftsmen’s families, not all children could inherit the trade and the workshop. The diary of seventeenth-century Derbyshire craftsman-farmer Leonard Wheatcroft is an example of how the destinies of sons and daughters followed different paths. Whilst the sons learned the tailor’s trade from their father and later became apprentices in London, the daughters alternated between periods of apprenticeship in the country or the city, periods spent at home with their family and other times when they were employed as domestic workers by relatives, in some cases until they got married (Mendelson and Crawford 1998: 96–97). Domestic service in relatives’ homes was not necessarily a sign of poverty and unmarried male relatives or widowers who needed someone to look after their homes often resorted to the services of family members. Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), in his famous Diary, wrote that he had told his sister that it was his intention to take her into his home, not as his sister, but as his servant, and, when she went to live with him, he did not even allow her to sit at his dinner table. The case of England remains, in many ways, peculiar. The 1563 Statute of Artificers gave local officials the power to force unmarried women between the ages of 12 and 40 to go into domestic service on the terms and for the wages that they deemed most appropriate. If a woman refused, she could be imprisoned until she changed her mind. This was often the fate of many girls who lived alone with their mothers, but almost never of those who lived with their fathers. The potential danger of women living alone, both for them and for their communities, comes to light very clearly here (Mendelson and Crawford 1998).

  Servants and Slaves 

113

Domestic service was an occupation typical of migrants, with all the possibilities and risks that the migrant status entailed for young women, and many of the laws that, in German cities, restricted the rights of people to move from one place to another, concerned female domestic servants. In the eighteenth century, when all over Europe the movement of people was subject to harsher control, in Sweden domestic service was made compulsory for all migrants to the cities who had neither job nor property, and who wanted to avoid being arrested for vagrancy (Vainio-­ Korhonen 2013). However, ‘migration’ might be neither free nor voluntary: in early modern Europe, and especially around the Mediterranean, domestic slaves continued to exist, and to be bought, sold and given away as gifts. It was probably entirely normal for the lady of the house of a respectable middle-class Venetian family to leave three ducats “to Maria the house slave”, as we read in the 1527 testament of Elisabetta Cavazza, the widow of Dragan, or for Bernardino Giova, in his 1528 will, to order that “the Ethiopian Maria, my servant” be freed five years after his death, and given a dowry when she married.2 Female domestic slavery, however, decreased considerably during the early modern age, following changes in the supply chains: slaves were now primarily a side effect of the wars against the Ottoman Empire, and were therefore mostly men destined for the galleys. In Mediterranean Europe, the change in trade routes and the increased supply in the labour market, in a context of demographic growth, were some of the causes of the feminisation of domestic service, which was however considered dishonourable work and almost akin to prostitution. This was particularly true in the part of southern Italy which was under Spanish rule, where slaves continued to be a significant presence even in the modern age. In Sicily, in the sixteenth century, estimates on the number of slaves fluctuate between 12,000 and 50,000, and sources of the time, probably with some exaggeration, speak of 22,000 slaves living in Naples in the seventeenth century. In Trapani, between 1593 and 1594, women made up 62 per cent of the slaves and in Italy, as well as in Spain and Portugal, we find regulations on slavery right up to the nineteenth century (Angiolini 1996; Sarti 1999; Da Molin 2002; Fauve-Chamoux 2009). Female domestic slaves were often the targets of their owners’ sexual attention, with a rather predictable consequence: the birth of illegitimate

114 

A. Bellavitis

children, who would either swell the numbers of those abandoned in foundling hospitals or remain with their mothers in their masters’ homes, being, officially, “born of an unknown father”. However, there was also a kind of self-regulation of these births, for very practical reasons: the owners feared losing their slave girls in childbirth, given the risks that every woman faced at that time, or that having children would be the first step towards a slave’s emancipation (Stella 1997). We are talking about a particularly perverse system of exploitation, within which, however, unexpected spaces for negotiation could open up for women too. In 1704, in Cadiz, a Turkish slave called Theresa Josepha filed a lawsuit with the ecclesiastical court against her master, Antonio de Medina, claiming that, when he was widowed, he had pledged to set her free in exchange for sexual favours: as evidence of the relations between them, a baby girl had been born nine months after the death of her master’s wife and abandoned in an orphanage. Two female slaves, belonging to different masters, confirmed Theresa Josepha’s account, declaring that Antonio had treated her well and cared for her after childbirth. Conversely, the defence predictably insisted on Antonio’s honour, honesty and morality, accusing the slave of leading a depraved and promiscuous life, since “it is well known that the said slave girl went out in the street whenever she wanted and had several friendships and relationships with men from her country of birth and with other men, to whom illicit passion and communication are entirely natural”. It is a singular statement: the slave girl had apparently been very ‘free’! Theresa Josepha ended up in prison, but we do not know the final outcome of the trial, which does at least prove the existence of an opportunity to speak out and act, which the court initially heeded, by accepting the law suit and the statements of witnesses, such as the other female slaves, who were undoubtedly socially weak, if not suspicious (Stella 2003). Domestic slavery continued to exist in Spain until the nineteenth century. From 1758 to 1806, the ‘Sales’ section of the Madrid newspaper Diario featured 74 adverts selling slaves as domestic servants, 29 of which advertised women. Some of these adverts are both eloquent and disturbing in their ‘normality’: a strong mora slave girl, 19 years old; a baptised slave girl, who can cook, wash and sew; a negra female aged around 27, who can cook, iron, spin and sew; a white Christian slave girl, 27 and

  Servants and Slaves 

115

attractive, raised in Spain; an 11-year-old mulata; a 17- or 18-year-old negra slave girl, who can cook, bake cakes and biscuits, spin and sew; a 9-year-old negrita, healthy, flawless and attractive, a survivor of smallpox and measles and willing to learn all kinds of work. On the urban markets, female slaves were more expensive than male ones because they were more specialised in domestic work. The pages of Diario also featured adverts placed by freed female slaves searching for work: they would generally have been freed in accordance with their masters’ wills and were often the consequence of sexual relations between masters and slave girls. Domestic service appears to have been a natural route by which they could integrate themselves into the paid job market (Sarasua 1994: 118–127). Domestic service was also a job like any other, regardless of family structures, rules for the inheritance of assets and forced dependence relationships. In the early modern age, it was one of the most accessible occupations to working-class girls emigrating from the countryside (Hill 1996). At the end of the eighteenth century, in Bologna, 18.8 per cent of female workers were employed in domestic service, which therefore made it the second most common occupation for women, after spinning (23.6 per cent). They were mostly live-in domestic workers, whereas male servants more often lived independently of their masters and could therefore have a family of their own (Palazzi 1990). At the end of the eighteenth century, domestic service became more ‘feminised’ in the Iberian Peninsula, too, as a result of the massive immigration of women to the cities, particularly in the nineteenth century. According to the job adverts published in Madrid’s Diario in 1758, 23.7 per cent of the offers of domestic service came from women and 76.2 per cent from men, but a century later they were almost equal: 49.4 per cent from women and 50.5 per cent from men. Madrid’s middle-class families had up to two or three servants. For example, there might be a girl to do the housework and a young man in charge of fetching water and accompanying the lady of the house to do her shopping, or a married couple, where “the wife can sew, iron and cook and the husband can write and carry out the other jobs needed in a home”, as an advert in the Diario from 21 January 1788 specified. In addition to the female domestic servants who did the housework and for whom the establishment of the

116 

A. Bellavitis

middle classes meant the consequent demand for higher hygiene standards and the maintaining of a certain level of decorum, female domestic servants were taken on to care for children, as we can see in an advert from 16 September 1782: “Wanted: a woman aged around 40 and with some experience, to look after a two-year-old child”. Although the presence of a male servant was a symbol of social status and conferred honour upon the household, many middle-class families preferred to keep two female domestic servants, one for the kitchen and the other for cleaning and linen duties, both to save on servants’ quarters and to avoid dangerously promiscuous behaviour. Further down in the social hierarchy, in the artisan and small tradesmen’s classes, there was only one female domestic servant, “who can boil meat, knit and sew well enough”, as outlined in an advert from 6 December 1759 (Sarasua 1994: 40, 100, 106, 109). In this case, too, more or less consensual sexual relationships between the head of the household, or his sons, and the young maids were common currency everywhere, and were also at the root of the bad reputation of female servants. In the moralistic treaties of Protestant Germany, they were accused of wanting to seduce their employers, a widespread opinion which could always be turned against women in the not infrequent cases when their masters were responsible for their pregnancies (Wiesner 1999). Sometimes, they were stories ‘with a happy ending’, if the man decided to take care of the woman and her offspring: Venetian dyer Zuane de Polo, in his 1587 will, provided a dowry for Lucrezia, the daughter of his domestic servant Elena, “whether she is or is not my daughter”, for her education in a convent and also for Elena’s maintenance, so that she could marry “a decent man” and not “run herself ragged”, or end up on the game.3 However, the sources also document cases where a pregnant servant was able to take her master to court, or, more frequently, threaten to do so and thereby tarnish his reputation, with the aim of winning compensation, if not a marriage proposal. Cases of this kind are well documented in judicial sources throughout Europe, from England to Spain, and shed light on the possibilities of reaction that the law offered women, and which they took advantage of, particularly when they could count on the support of their own families, whereas it was harder for a woman acting alone, in an obvious position of social inferiority, to defend herself (Capp 1999).

  Servants and Slaves 

117

The working relationship was a peculiar one, as it was based on personal, intimate relationships: the maids knew their masters’ secrets, and received from them gifts and often clothes no longer worn or fashionable, which would later reappear in their inventories or in the legacies that they left to their daughters or granddaughters. In Spain, the tendency to establish an artificial relationship of kinship with one’s masters was particularly strong. This, in fact, often arose from attempts by wealthy families to evade the tax payable on servants by declaring them as relatives. The usual term for a servant was criado, meaning educated at home, and the law established that the person who educated a child at home had no rights over his or her property and could not force them into service or slavery (Sarti 2007). Personal relationships with masters’ families could be enduring, also because domestic service could last a lifetime and sometimes proved to be incompatible with the possibility of contracting a marriage and starting a family of one’s own. The wills of female servants who named their masters as heirs, or who left legacies to the children, by then grown up, whom they had wet nursed, well documented in the Italian archives, may at first glance be surprising, since we could rightfully assume that servants would not have had much to leave their employers. In practice, the bequests would often amount to some unpaid wages, but could also go further and include all of the meagre savings accumulated over a working life, or even money that the servants had lent to their masters over the years. It was perhaps a tacit agreement, according to which an elderly servant no longer able to work, but who had continued to live in her masters’ house, thus compensated them in some way for the assistance she had received (Bellavitis 2008). Unlike the vast majority of jobs, a female servant could therefore hope for some kind of pension even after the end of her employment relationship, as evidenced by some sources, such as a Venetian woman’s will from 1561, which reads: “I also leave my domestic servant Santina, who has served me for a long time, four bushels of wheat, four casks of wine taken from my properties, and four ducats a year for as long as she lives”, or another from 1573, where a mother instructs her son to “give Anzola, who has been serving in the house for 18 years, a Venetian bushel of wheat, a quarta of wine and thirty bundles of wood every year, for as long as she lives”. “Three Venetian bushels of wheat and ten casks of good

118 

A. Bellavitis

wine” were destined “every year of her life” by a Venetian barber to the woman who had “well cared for my son Francesco”. At the very least, a maid could expect to receive, upon the death of her employers, any unpaid wages and some additional gifts: money, clothes, a bed or perhaps some kitchen utensils.4 The hiring of maids was sometimes organised by municipal institutions. In the sixteenth century, in Paris or Nuremberg, the female intermediary who found the maids was paid by the city: this was the formalisation of a role that already existed and of which the administration simply took control in order to respond to the growing demand in a context of rapid urban development (Fauve-Chamoux 1990). During the sixteenth century, in Nuremberg, between 8 and 21 women were active at the same time in this occupation in the city, and they were mostly craftsmen’s wives or widows. Their job was to find girls of good character and able to work, mostly from the surrounding countryside, for whose behaviour they had to answer. However, the city council often had reason to complain about the intermediaries’ work, accusing them of encouraging maids to flee their positions so as to be able to re-claim the fee owed to them for each girl who went into service following their recommendations (Wiesner 1981). The relationship of confidence that was established between the employers’ families and the young maids could be a double-edged sword: for example, when it was used as a pretext by employers not to pay wages. The maids could then take their employers to court and even win, as evidenced by some research, for example on Nantes in the sixteenth century. The parties involved were always women: the servant and the lady of the house, who not only took care of the daily dealings with her domestic staff, but, in artisan families, also supervised their production work, such as tailoring, knitting or sewing. In Nantes there were no domestic service contracts, but only verbal agreements, so information about length of service and wages can only be gathered from the judicial sources. Generally, domestic servants worked for a year, for an annual salary of around 50 sous for a maid with no previous experience, in addition to lodging and some items of clothing. A maid with more experience and also able to provide medical care could earn four or five times as much, up to 20 livres. The average salary was about ten sous per month, plus board and lodging.

  Servants and Slaves 

119

Judged by the municipal authorities, these cases often ended with the recommendation that the maids be treated with ‘Christian charity’, but they could also end with a sentence in favour of the latter, which meant their employers had to pay the wages due to them. Many times the conflict arose from a desire to leave work ahead of time: if the reason given was to find better wages or the employers’ bad reputation, the suit was generally lost and the judges forced them to return to their positions. If, on the other hand, maids claimed to have been beaten, the judges might accept the reasons and require their employers to let them go, pay the wages due and return their personal belongings to them (Brunelle 1998). The Venetian legislation on domestic work in the mediaeval and early modern ages was particularly plentiful and even in this case, one of the main concerns was presented by runaway servants and the thefts that might follow. In Venice, contracts lasted a rather long time, around seven years, and were often written down. In the mid-sixteenth century, salary limits were set according to precise distinctions of tasks and gender. The massare, that is female domestic servants, were paid a maximum of 6 ducats a year (about 38 lire per year), while wet nurses received 7 lire per month and had to remain at home until the baby was weaned. If, later on, they were indebted to their employers due to wages paid to them in advance, they had to stay on as massare until their debt was settled, but paid the same wages as the other massare in the house. The contracts of male servants, in addition to providing higher wages, were for shorter terms: the minimum was six months, whereas for a female domestic worker it was one year. The maids who received clothes from their employers were allowed to keep them for a year after the end of their contracts (compared to six months for male servants). In cases of breach of contract, male servants were sentenced to jail for 18 months, while women were imprisoned for six. The sixteenth-century rules are evidence of the concern of legislators to ensure safe and cheap sources of domestic work, stressing the “sanctity” of contracts, punishing those who did not abide by them, setting limits to wages and discouraging workers’ mobility (Romano 1991; for data on wage servants in seventeenth- and eighteenth-­ century England, see Lehmann 2005). As a means of support that did not require any special skills, domestic service was also the occupation most easily available to young girls leaving

120 

A. Bellavitis

orphanages. Nevertheless, the charity institutions governors felt that they had a duty to protect the honour and virginity of young girls as their “fathers and heads of families” would, and with a view to their future marriage. They preferred then to keep them as long as possible within the institution, where they could work, above all as textile workers, and also pass their skills on to younger girls. This is at least what happened in Italy in the early modern age, even if, progressively, this policy was changed, probably due to the overcrowding of the hospitals. In the sixteenth century, girls could only leave the Ospizio dell’Annunziata, in Naples, if they had domestic service contracts signed by a notary and by their employers, who undertook to provide food, clothing and a monthly salary of six ducats per year. If the girl “lost her honour”, her employer had to pay a fine of 100 ducats, equivalent to 25 years of salary, which were to be used as her dowry (Da Molin 1990). In the seventeenth century, the governors of the Ospedale dei Mendicanti in Florence informed those who asked them for a servant that “the custom and rule of this House of Charity is to always take care of the people who are admitted, and sent out to work as maids, and therefore it endeavours to place them with people who also ensure they are taken care of, for the sake of their reputation, and if they fail, they are all prosecuted with the same rigour”. In the case of the Ospedale degli Innocenti, going into service was allowed for girls aged between 10 and 18, provided that it was aimed at building up their dowry, that is, for a future marriage or to enter a monastery, so that if a girl did not get married, she had to stay with the same family, theoretically for the rest of her life (Lombardi and Reggiani 1990). As time went by, however, limitations were abandoned and‚ both in Florence and in Milan, the use of domestic service as a means of reducing the overcrowding in charitable institutions prevailed. The duty of protection did not disappear, and may suffice to explain why, after all, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries not many girls from the foundling institutions went into service: in the case of the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence, from 1700 to 1724, they made up 165 out of the 600 or 700 girls assisted by the institution, depending on the period in question. Of these, 73 married at the end of their period of service, 33 remained in service, 31 were returned to the Ospedale. Their remuneration was explicitly earmarked for their dowries and was therefore paid at

  Servants and Slaves 

121

the end of their term of employment, the duration of which depended on the time necessary to build up their dowries. In the sixteenth century, at the Innocenti, this was between 10 and 12 years; in the seventeenth century, the deputies of the Ospedale Maggiore in Milan indicated precisely that the 200 lire of the dowry corresponded to the remuneration of eight years’ service begun at the age of 14. The link between dowry and salary was so close that employers did not hesitate in dismissing the girls before the agreed term expired, so as to avoid paying the salary-dowry. However, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it had increasingly become customary for the Ospedale to provide the dowries, which probably explains the shorter term of service and the fact that service started at an older age (Lombardi and Reggiani 1990). In Florence, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the monthly wages of maids varied between 2 and 4 lire, whereas the cooks and girls employed in the personal care of aristocratic women received 4 or 5 lire. Manservants’ wages were significantly higher, ranging between 7 and 12 lire per month, whereas liveried servants could earn up to 1 lira per day (Lombardi and Reggiani 1990). In Udine, between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the salaries of maids varied according to task and age: “A good massara in charge of keys will be given 6 ducats a year, a young or older maid 4 ducats a year, to a younger, less experienced maid 3 ducats per year, to a young, very inexperienced maid 12 lire, in all cases over and above the ordinary household expenses”, wrote Gregorio Stainero in his treatise Il perito arithmetico e geometrico (The arithmetics and geometry expert) (Morassi 1990). At the end of the sixteenth century, in Venice, a cook might receive about ten ducats per year, a nanny “who only takes care of two children and eats at the table with the employers” might demand 30. A servant who was “loyal”, and, in addition to serving, took care of the shopping, sewing and embroidering deserved more than 24 ducats per year, according to what the witnesses for a servant abused by her master, who treated her “like a slave”, declared in 1594 (Bellavitis 2006). Domestic service was not only carried out within a family, but also in institutions, from royal courts to monasteries. In Turin, the fame di Camera, or figlie di Camera, were the female domestic staff employed in the personal service of the princesses and noblewomen at the duke’s court,

122 

A. Bellavitis

comparable to the femmes de chambre of the French courts. The court accounts records show that all the female members of the duke’s family had from two to eight fame or figlie in their service: in 1712, for example, eight women who served the Madama Reale, Maria Giovanna Battista of Savoy-Nemours, widow of the Duke of Savoy, Charles Emanuel II, received annual salaries ranging between 600 and 1500 lire. The salaries of Madama Reale’s room valets ranged from 800 to 1500 lire, whereas those of the seven room valets of her son, the duke Victor Amadeus II, were between 700 and 1200 lire. However, salaries were only a part of the benefits and earnings that could be drawn from this type of job, namely, the hiring of other family members, gifts, tax exemptions or dowries for one’s daughters (Cavallo 2006). In England and France, especially when there was a queen as a head of state or, in the case of France, a regent, the court offered high salaries to the women who held specific offices and the competition to be awarded such offices or to ensure that other women in one’s family were awarded them was particularly fierce. Although the court’s maids received low wages, these were compensated for by material advantages, from gratuities to gifts of clothing and accessories, but also by dowries and old-age pensions (Mendelson and Crawford 1998). Female service work in hospitals and, in Catholic countries, in convents was widespread throughout Europe. The documents kept by these institutions often allow access to information which is harder to come by elsewhere, such as wages, rules and any guarantee and protection enjoyed by these workers. In fact, these jobs were less precarious than others, often guaranteed food and shelter and in many cases required specific skills, even though pay levels, with equal skill levels, were nevertheless lower than those of male servants. In convents, in theory there should have been no need of maids, since the nuns took a vow of poverty, but in practice, not only were there hierarchies inside the convents, meaning the lay sisters took care of domestic work, but female and male domestic staff were also hired, to carry out the tasks of daily life. The increase in the number of lay sisters in early modern convents is connected to situations of economic crisis, such as in Naples in the second half of the seventeenth century, but also to the general tendency to a greater presence of noblewomen in convents, increasingly tied to the family and succession strategies of the urban nobility (Evangelisti 2006).

  Servants and Slaves 

123

The need for domestic staff became even less avoidable when, after the Council of Trent, enclosure was imposed on all female orders: there was a need for people who provided the link with the outside world, for all the material needs of daily life. In Spain, the 1639 Constitutions of the Poor Clares allowed a maid to every ten nuns, explicitly forbidding the presence of personal maids; the 1683 rules of Cistercian convents, confirmed in 1786, allowed the number of maids necessary to ordinary service and the Constitutions of the Benedictine Congregations, dated 1706, authorised the presence of maids, aged over 12, in particular to attend to the Mother Superior and the elderly or sick nuns (Rey Castelao 2010). Ultimately, all female convents took on both female and male personnel: in 1756, 2803 people were employed in 862 convents in the Crown of Castile. At the end of the century, there were 4366 in the whole of Spain. In the male monasteries there were no maids, but it was normal to use external female personnel, such as washerwomen or bakers. Many female servants lived in female convents, even if, on the whole, the domestic staff employed by female convents were much fewer than those employed by male monasteries and there were many differences between the religious orders. The nuns of the military orders, who came from the upper classes, had a lot of domestic staff, followed by the Benedictines and the Cistercians, who had an average of 10.9 employees per convent, whereas mendicant nuns had 4.5. Personal maids did not have contracts, but they were given board and lodging and were placed under the protection of a nun, with whom they shared a cell, preparing her food, washing her clothes and providing communication with the outside world, since, unlike cloistered nuns, they could come and go from the convent (Rey Castelao 2010). Female servants in convents earned more than those in hospital institutions. Additionally, they were allowed stay in the institution if they were sick or too old to work. In these cases, the wage differences between men and women were not very high. In the early decades of the eighteenth century, the wages of the maids in the monastery of San Paio, in Santiago, were higher than the washerwomen’s (between 22 per cent and 31.4 per cent higher, depending on the latter’s skill levels) and much higher (between 36.9 per cent and 62.2 per cent more) than those

124 

A. Bellavitis

received by hospital maids. However, its real value varied according to whether it was given in kind or in cash: from 1777 to 1786, the highest wages would buy 823.1 litres of rye per year but only 388.5 from 1797 to 1807 (Rey Castelao 2010). Despite the variety of specific occupations, contracts and places, service work was characterised by personal dependence and a certain degree, variable as well, of intimacy between worker and employer. It was an activity carried out inside a house or an institution and which involved a certain degree of protection. This personal relationship, as we have seen, could mean greater room for negotiation than in other activities, but it also entailed risks, particularly for young women working in private homes. So we get to the crucial point: who were the people who actually worked as domestic staff? The terminology in use, as we have in some cases mentioned, insisted on young age (criado, criada, in Spanish or Portuguese), on virginity: maid in English, mädchen in German or pige in Danish identified both a servant and a maiden girl. Of course, they would often be very young girls, but especially in the eighteenth century, also women over 30 years old (20.9 per cent in Belgrade between 1733 and 1774, 33 per cent in Bayeux at the end of the eighteenth century, 15.8 per cent in London between 1715 and 1752, where in the same years married maids constituted 8.5 per cent and widows 9.2 per cent of all female domestic servants) or even over 40 (10.4 per cent in Belgrade and 14 per cent in Bayeux) (Sarti 2005; Simonton 2011). In the eighteenth century, domestic service in Italy was characterised by older people than in northern Europe and by being an occupation practised throughout one’s life. The data available for Rome in the second half of the seventeenth century shows a percentage of 58.2 per cent of female domestic servants over the age of 30, a percentage that rises to 67.2 per cent in the two years 1715–1716. Similar percentages are found in Reggio Emilia, where female servants who were over 30 years old were, in 1708, 56.2 per cent (Arru 1990). In Rome, in the eighteenth century, competition between female and male staff was fierce and immigration of female prospective domestic servants took place at a young age, mostly before the age of 19. When migration to the capital took place within the family or could rely on a family network, marriage was often early, too,

  Servants and Slaves 

125

while in the case of individual or later migration, marriage took place later, between 25 and 29 years of age (Arru 1988). In the case of Rome, from the end of the eighteenth century onwards, the growing feminisation of domestic work and the increase in the immigration of single women also determined a change in the marriage patterns in this social group. Between the early eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century, the percentage of immigrant women (unmarried or married) out of the total number to women in the city doubled. Emigrating on their own meant in many cases postponing their marriage and partly building a career in domestic service, becoming more and more specialised and thus being able to access positions in families of the higher social classes, which, up to the seventeenth century, had preferred to hire male rather than female domestic servants. Marriage was usually to other immigrants, very rarely to local people, whereas those who returned to the country to marry would often have people they had met in the city or their masters themselves as witnesses. In short, emigration modified the networks of relationships, placing these women and their original environments in new relational contexts. Likewise, even in the marriages of these immigrant maids which were celebrated in Rome, people coming from the most varied contexts and from various areas of the city would appear as witnesses. This was due to both the work and geographical mobility that characterised many domestic servants’ careers between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Arru 1996).

Notes 1. ASVE: Giustizia Vecchia (Venice State Archives: Old Justice), b. 5, reg. 13, f° 87. 2. ASVE: NT (Venice State Archives: Notaries, Last wills), b. 127, I, 40; b. 192, f°. 67v, 18 September 1528. 3. ASVE: NT (Venice State Archives: Notaries, Last wills), b. 393, n. 507, 25 mai 1587. 4. ASVE: NT (Venice State Archives: Notaries, Last wills), b. 196, n. 829, 9 July 1561; b. 783, n. 1105, 16 September 1573; b. 124, n. 75, 15 March 1544.

126 

A. Bellavitis

References Angiolini, F. (1996). Schiave. In A.  Groppi (Ed.), Il lavoro delle donne (pp. 92–115). Rome: Viella. Arru, A. (1988). Il matrimonio tardivo dei servi e delle serve. Quaderni Storici, 68(2), 469–496. Arru, A. (1990). The Distinguishing Features of Domestic Service in Italy. Journal of Family History, 15(1), 547–566. Arru, A. (1996). Uomini e donne nel mercato del lavoro servile. In A. Groppi (Ed.), Il lavoro delle donne (pp. 247–268). Rome: Laterza. Bellavitis, A. (2006). Le travail des femmes dans les contrats d’apprentissage de la Giustizia Vecchia (Venise, XVIe siècle). In I. Chabot, J. Hayez, & D. Lett (Eds.), La famille, les femmes et le quotidien (XIVe–XVIIIe siècle) (pp. 181–195). Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Bellavitis, A. (2008). Famille, genre, transmission à Venise au XVIe siècle. Rome: École Française de Rome. Brunelle, G.  K. (1998). Contractual kin: Servants and Their Mistresses in Sixteenth-Century Nantes. Journal of Early Modern History, 2(4), 374–394. Capp, B. (1999). The Double Standard Revisited: Plebeian Women and Male Sexual Reputation in Early Modern England. Past and Present, 162(1), 70–100. Cavallo, S. (2006). Métiers apparentés. Barbiers-chirurgiens et artisans du corps à Turin (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle). Histoire Urbaine, 15, 27–48. Da Molin, G. (1990). Family Forms and Domestic Service in Southern Italy from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries. Journal of Family History, 15(4), 503–527. Da Molin, G. (2002). Famiglia e matrimonio nell’Italia del Seicento. Bari: Cacucci. Evangelisti, S. (2006). Ricche e povere. Classi di religiose nelle comunità monastiche femminili tra Cinque e Seicento. In M. Lanzinger & R. Sarti (Eds.), Nubili e celibi tra scelta e costrizione (secoli XVI–XX) (pp.  37–48). Udine: Forum. Fauve-Chamoux, A. (1990). Destins de femmes et manufacture textile à Reims avant la Révolution industrielle. In S.  Cavaciocchi (Ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (pp. 225–245). Florence: Le Monnier.

  Servants and Slaves 

127

Fauve-Chamoux, A. (2009). Domesticité et parcours de vie. Servitude, service prémarital ou métier? Annales de Démographie Historique, 117(1), 5–34. Hill, B. (1996). Servants. English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lehmann, G. (2005). The Birth of a New Profession: The Housekeeper and Her Status in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. In I. Baudino, J. Carré, & C.  Révauger (Eds.), The Invisible Woman. Aspects of Women’s Work in Eighteenth-Century Britain (pp. 9–25). London/New York: Routledge. Lombardi, D., & Reggiani, F. (1990). Da assistita a serva. Circuiti di reclutamento delle serve attraverso le istituzioni assistenziali (Firenze-Milano, XVII– XVIII secolo). In S. Cavaciocchi (Ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (pp. 301–319). Florence: Le Monnier. Mendelson, S., & Crawford, P. (1998). Women in Early Modern England 1550–1720. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Morassi, L. (1990). La donna nell’economia friulana tra Patriarcato e Repubblica. In S. Cavaciocchi (Ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (pp. 329–344). Florence: Le Monnier. Palazzi, M. (1990). “Tessitrici, serve, treccole”. Donne, lavoro e famiglia a Bologna nel Settecento. In S. Cavaciocchi (Ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (pp. 359–376). Florence: Le Monnier. Rey Castelao, O. (2010). Trabajando a cubierto. Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, 40(2). http://mcv.revues.org/3575 Romano, D. (1991). The Regulation of Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice. The Sixteenth Century Journal, 22(4), 661–677. Sarasúa, C. (1994). Criados, nodrizas y amos. El servicio doméstico en la formación del mercado de trabajo madrileño, 1758–1868. Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno de España Editores, S.A. Sarti, R. (1999). Viaggiatrici per forza. Schiave “turche” in Italia in età moderna. In D.  Corsi (Ed.), Altrove. Viaggi di donne dall’antichità al Novecento (pp. 241–296). Rome: Viella. Sarti, R. (2005). Who Are Servants? Defining Domestic Service in Western Europe (16–21 Centuries). In S.  Pasleau, I.  Schopp, & R.  Sarti (Eds.), Proceedings of the Servant Project, 5 vols (vol. II, pp. 3–59). Liège: Éditions de l’Université de Liège.

128 

A. Bellavitis

Sarti, R. (2007). Criados, servi, domestiques, gesinde, servants: For a Comparative History of Domestic Service in Europe (16th–19th Centuries). Obradoiro de Historia Moderna, 16, 9–39. Simonton, D. (2011). “Birds of Passage” or “Career Women”? Thoughts on the Life Cycle of the Eighteenth-Century European Servant. Women’s History Review, 20(2), 207–225. Stella, A. (1997). Des esclaves pour la liberté sexuelle de leurs maîtres (Europe Occidentale, XIVe–XVIIIe siècles). Clio, Histoire‚ femmes et sociétés, 5, 191–209. Stella, A. (2003). Se soumettre pour se libérer. Une esclave turque face à son maître espagnol à Cadix en 1704. Clio. Histoire‚ femmes et sociétés, 1, 163–174. Vainio-Korhonen, K. (2013). Everyday Politics. Power Relations of Urban Female Servants in the Finnish City of Turku in the 1770s. In D. Simonton & A.  Montenach (Eds.), Female Agency in the Urban Economy. Gender in European Towns, 1640–1830 (pp. 189–205). New York/London: Routledge. Wiesner, M. E. (1981). Paltry Peddlers or Essential Merchants? Women in the Distributive Trades in Early Modern Nuremberg. The Sixteenth Century Journal, XII(2), 3–13. Wiesner, M.  E. (1999). Having Her Own Smoke. Employment and Independence for Singlewomen in Germany, 1400–1750. In J. M. Bennett & A.  M. Froide (Eds.), Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800 (pp. 192–216). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

9 Caring and Feeding

We mentioned earlier the rare cases of women allowed to teach medicine or anatomy in universities, but medical activities were very varied, and based on knowledge that was not necessarily acquired at university. In the Republic of Venice, the rules of the Provveditori alla Sanità on the medical profession referred to men and women, which shows that many women were active in medical or surgical professions, even though they had no university degree. A provision from 1511 forbade “any physician, surgeon […] or other person either male or female to dare treat or to give any remedy to anyone affected by the plague” and a law from1546 rejected the licence to treat […] to any person of whatever status or social ranking both from this city or foreigners, barbers, grocers, charlatans and any other person either male or female who had not graduated from public studies or from privileged or collegiate ones in the city.1

In 1614, the rules of the Salisbury’s guild of barber-surgeons forbade non-citizens and members of the guild to practise any type of surgery, addressing in particular women “incompetent in the surgical craft, who

© The Author(s) 2018 A. Bellavitis, Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96541-3_9

129

130 

A. Bellavitis

practise remedies, at great risk for their patients”. In fact, many women, in addition to carrying out operations independently, were also hired by hospitals: like Mrs Cook, a surgeon-pharmacist who was hired by Christ Church Hospital, in London, in 1576, or Françoise Page, hired with her husband by the Hôtel Dieu in Lyon at the end of the sixteenth century to treat patients affected by syphilis. Once widowed, she continued to work in the institution. In Brittany, in 1568, Parliament established that only those who had taken an exam with a doctor expert in anatomy could practise surgery. The widows of surgeons were admitted to the guild if they could prove they had two years’ experience, but later rules prescribed that they could not hold the title of master, nor treat patients without consulting a master surgeon. The Paris Parliament, in 1755, decreed that women and girls could practise surgery only in relation to childbirth and could not practise pharmacy. London’s guild of barber-surgeons, founded in 1540, decreed that women could access the seven-year apprenticeships, be admitted to the guild, hire apprentices, but could not stand for office in the guild. In hospitals, however, they were generally paid less than men or only allowed to perform certain operations. Women were allowed to extract teeth, and in Lincoln, York, Norwich and Dublin they were admitted to the barbers’ guilds. The women who, during the early modern age, obtained from the archbishop of Canterbury a ‘licence’ to practise the medical professions had to prove their practical experience, gained through years of activity, with letters of recommendation from the local authorities. Some of them have left evidence of their medical expertise in diaries that we are still able to read (Broomhall 2003; Whaley 2011: 133). The mechanisms of assistance to the poor organised at a local level in the European cities of the early modern age were largely based on women’s work, seen as an extension, in the public sphere, of the activities carried out by women in the private one. These activities could also include medical practices, in contradiction with the exclusion of women from universities, where medical knowledge was passed on. The question is interesting and, as often happens in the history of women, full of contradictions and paradoxes. Sixteenth-century moralist literature promoted the idea of domestic medicine managed by women: in 1524, Juan Luis Vives, author of a fundamental treatise on the education of Christian

  Caring and Feeding 

131

women, claimed that women should treat their families and that when husbands were ill, wives had to care for them personally, without delegating their servants. Other contemporary books extended women’s caring duties outside the home, to the poor, while pointing out that women from polite society were not required to carry out these duties in person, but rather provide them through charitable gifts or by organising and managing care institutions, where nurses and maids would actually work. In Spain, we find specific female figures with caring duties, the beatas, who received alms from the municipal authorities to care for the sick, in hospitals or in the prisons, especially during the plague epidemics. The figure of the “holy healer” became more and more popular in early modern Spain, as a consequence not so much of increased religiosity, but rather of women’s poverty, in a context of demographic growth and economic uncertainty, and therefore with an ever-increasing number of single women needing to eke out a living (Perry 1990). The institutional sources testify as to the widespread presence of women as nurses in hospitals. In Protestant Germany, as a result of the secularisation of many hospitals, lazarettos and orphanages, many women were hired to care for the poor and the sick. The management positions were mainly entrusted to married or widowed women, but in the lower ranks even unmarried women could find a job, especially during epidemics. When the situation returned to normal, however, the municipal ordinances prescribed the recruitment of “married women of a certain age or of widows without children” to provide assistance to the sick (Wiesner 1999). The rules of the Westminster Infirmary of 1759 prescribed that “nurses are to be unmarried, without the burden of children, free from any distemper and under the age of forty-five at their admission” (Carré 2005: 94) In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the rules of the Royal Hospital in Santiago de Compostela prescribed that the head nurse be “of good name”, but did not specify her marital status. The 1804 rules, on the other hand, required the recruitment of widows or unmarried women “of any age, and of the best conduct and proven charity towards the poor”. The contemporary rules of Granada’s hospital prescribed the recruitment of a married couple, a male nurse to care for the men and a female one to care for the women. In the eighteenth century, the San Rocco syphilis hospital, in Santiago de Compostela, employed two female

132 

A. Bellavitis

nurses, a washerwoman for the sick and one for the healthy, five maids and two cooks, in addition to as many men, to care for 270 patients on average. They were not full-time jobs, but were remunerated by fixed wages, for a small part in cash and for the rest in kind, with rations of meat, wine and cereals, depending on the job. Women were paid less than men, but the wage gap was not very high: the female head nurse received average wages of 337 reales and the male head nurse of 348. The wages of the other female nurses were the same as those of the male nurses: 266 reales for the “lower” nurse and 205 for the “convalescence” nurse; 337 for the head cook and 200 for the “lower” cook (Rey Castelao 2010). The Royal Hospital in Santiago de Compostela, which cared for 600 patients at the beginning of the eighteenth century and over 1000 at the end of the century, employed far more staff, better paid and provided with food and housing, but the pay gap between men and women was larger. The infirmary was divided into two sections, male and female; the male head nurse had the status of ministro mayor and supervised the infirmary and the administration of medicines, meals and clothes, receiving, in 1756, wages of 323 reales in cash and 1255 in kind. In 1756, his cash wages reached 1323 reales and, in 1804, 1732. The six ‘lower’ male nurses were paid 58 reales in cash and 655 in kind until 1756, when their wages were increased to 358 reales. The male domestic staff received 180 reales per year, divided between wages and food rations. The female head nurse had the status of ministro mayor too, and had the same duties as her male counterpart, even though she received much lower wages, that is, between cash and food rations, 1152 reales before 1756 and 1526 after. In 1792, her wages in cash went up from 463 to 850 reales. The four ‘lower’ female nurses received 528 reales until 1756 and 728 afterwards, mostly in kind. In 1769, the number of female nurses rose to five, but was reduced again to three in 1804. The governess of foundlings, in charge of receiving and distributing them to the wet nurses, received some of the lowest wages, 993 reales, between cash and food rations, increased in 1756 to 1543 and then again at the end of the century. The wages of the in-house wet nurses were very low and were not changed until the nineteenth century: in 1801 they were paid four reales per day (Rey Castelao 2010).

  Caring and Feeding 

133

Wages in kind were proportional to those in cash, so the female head nurse and the governess of foundlings had identical rations, but the former was entitled to six cartloads of wood and the latter was not. Female nurses received smaller rations of cereals, wine, meat and fish oil, and received neither wood nor candles. The real wages later increased: in the case of the female head nurse, in the second half of the century, there was an increase of 26 per cent, which effectively compensated for inflation. Overall, their wages were much better than those of the rest of the city’s female population, in addition to the fact that the post of nurse mayor was a lifetime, hereditary position with a pension entitlement. The women who, between 1681 and 1804, were employed as head nurses were married and came from the middle class or above. In 1741, their pension was estimated to amount to 1100 reales a year, with an additional 330 for their homes (Rey Castelao 2010). The same can be said about the governess of the foundlings, who was responsible for accepting the babies and ensuring their care, getting them baptised and managing the financial relations with the external wet nurses. In 1792, the in kind part of her wages was increased to 1461.26 reales, but the part in cash, which had already increased tenfold in 1756, increased again by 66 per cent in 1792. This was in recognition of the increased workload of these administrators, since foundlings were now more than 700 a year. The governesses of the foundlings were women of high social status: doña Estefanía de Flores, in office in 1753, was a lawyer’s wife. The position, permanent and hereditary, after death or retirement was passed on to daughters and granddaughters: from 1675 to 1824, there were eight governesses, serving on average 18  years each, and all passed their positions on to their daughters, granddaughters or sisters, without any limitations as to their marital status (Rey Castelao 2010). In the case of nurses, on the other hand, appointments lasted for an average of nine years and ceased because of marriage or dismissal or, less often, death or retirement. In the mid-eighteenth century, their cash wages increased, proportionately, more than those of the nurse mayor (450 per cent against 421 per cent) and their purchasing power trebled, but, in the second half of the century, this dropped by 31 per cent. The hospital also employed other female staff: a seamstress who, at the

134 

A. Bellavitis

beginning of the century, received 132 reales a year; a laundress responsible for the women’s laundry, in 1767 paid 413.30 reales per year, which in 1774 increased to 600; a kitchen and patients’ laundress, paid 115.5 reales, and a refectory and sacristy one, paid 214 reales. They remained in employment for an average of nine to ten years and in almost half of cases they stopped working due to dismissal: the lower the wages, the more frequent the dismissals. In 1736, wet nurses were paid 110.10 reales, plus 594 litres of rye per year, a pound of beef and a cuartillo of wine (Rey Castelao 2010). The wages paid by the institutions were often better than those which many other women could hope to get, in jobs which were either casualised or more subject to market changes or fashion, as in the case of the textile industry. Even in the past, public institutions could provide some job security to their employees, and their intervention in the management of the population’s health during the modern age became progressively more active and more effective, but in some cases, however, resulted in the “expropriation” of knowledge and ancient skills which had previously belonged to women, as we shall see in the next chapter. Before formula milk, sterilisable baby bottles and ready-made baby food existed, breastfeeding was the only or in any case the most effective way to feed newborn babies. However, childbirth mortality was very high; some women could not produce their own milk or breastfeed because of illnesses or physical impediments, others could not breastfeed because they had to resume working shortly after the birth and, in the upper classes, many women were urged not to breastfeed their children as a form of social control, which demanded that they quickly resume their public life and above all that they be available to resume sexual relations with their husbands and even to conceive again, to ensure, in a context of very high infant mortality, the continuation of their families and dynasties. In fact, the (rather weak) contraceptive effects of breastfeeding were known, and above all, according to Aristotle’s theory of bodily fluids, a pregnant woman had to stop breastfeeding her baby, because her blood, instead of bringing nourishment to the milk, would go to feed the foetus. A Venetian law from 1440 punished wet nurses who continued to breastfeed despite being pregnant, depriving them of their entire wages, that is even of the wages for the period when they had breastfed without being pregnant.2 In short, the availability of women who could feed infants

  Caring and Feeding 

135

with their milk was a vital need in old-regime societies. Who were the wet nurses? They often were women who had recently lost a young child, or new mothers prepared to leave their babies with other, even poorer, women, in order to breastfeed the children of others, or women whose children had grown enough to be weaned but who, by continuing to breastfeed, continued to produce milk. Of course, the competition with the wet nurses’ own children was always a risk and Margherita Datini, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, wrote that she was wary of wet nurses whose children were still alive, as she could not believe that they would not give them some of their own milk. Medical treaties, at least from the sixteenth century onwards, insisted on the need to persuade mothers to breastfeed their own children, a campaign that was clearly not addressed to women who could not breastfeed because they were sick or because they needed to work, but above all to women from the upper classes who, at least on the face of it, chose not to do it. Paradoxically, it was a totally unnatural behaviour for a new mother’s body, and one which could cause even serious diseases, such as mastitis, or required the use of medicinal preparations or interventions such as breast surgery. In seventeenth-century aristocratic families from Rome, the choice of wet nurses was entrusted to a group of women, who consulted each other and closely followed the progress of the children given to the various wet nurses. In this case, the family menfolk remained in the background and would intervene, thanks to their greater mobility, to check whether a wet nurse who lived on their land had given birth, for example, or to give her husband the money agreed. But the choice of wet nurse and the negotiation of wages took place between women: the wet nurses themselves would discuss their wages and the conditions of their move to live with the families, even using subterfuge, such as hiding any children who were not in good health and might cause bad publicity (D’Amelia 1999). When they were hired to live in their employers’ homes, they were treated better than the servants and received higher wages (Scherman 2014). In the seventeenth century, the British Puritan movement was particularly active in its campaign to promote breastfeeding, and there is evidence of women from the aristocracy who decided, against the wishes of their families, husbands and against customs, to

136 

A. Bellavitis

breastfeed their own children: a choice so unconventional as to be remembered in the short biographies that were sometimes carved on the headstones of the time. But it was above all the Enlightenment that opposed mercenary breastfeeding, and especially in France, the country where this custom was probably more widespread than anywhere else in Europe (Fields 1988). The urban organisation of wet nursing is very old: in the case of Paris, there is evidence of a wet nurses’ placement office as far back as the thirteenth century. In Renaissance Florence, between the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, wet nursing was a very well-organised practice, of which there is evidence in the libri di ricordanze (books of memories), where fathers recorded the agreements made with the balio, that is the wet nurse’s husband, as well as the payments, the dates when children were placed with wet nurses and, if all went well, the dates when children returned to their families, after years spent elsewhere. But many did not come back and were buried in the village or parish where they had been sent to be nursed (Klapisch-Zuber 1980). In seventeenth-century London, the wealthy families from the merchant or noble classes would generally send their children to wet nurses who lived up to 40 miles away from the city, whereas those who lived in smaller towns or in the countryside chose wet nurses who lived closer. For example, in 1624, London lawyer Hugh Cholmey sent his firstborn to be nursed in Kent, 28 miles from the capital, but since the family later moved to Yorkshire, his second son, born in 1632, was sent to a local wet nurse. Similarly, between 1580 and 1590, philosopher John Dee, who lived in Mortlake, Surrey, sent all of his children to wet nurses in neighbouring parishes, between half a mile and three miles from home. The nobility would take the wet nurses into their own homes, but this rarely happened with the middle class: in fact, wet nursing was more rural than urban, and in large cities like London or Paris, sending newborns to live in their wet nurses’ homes was also justified by the belief that it was healthier to bring children up ­outdoors in the countryside. At the same time, if the distance was too great, it became very difficult to keep in contact with the nurses, monitor their work, visit the children and follow their progress. Therefore, the choice between a wet nurse living close by or faraway was not always dictated by need, and we can also say that different choices were often a consequence

  Caring and Feeding 

137

of the gender of the newborn (Fields 1988). In noble families in fifteenth-­ century Florence, for example, the fact that girls were generally sent to the country, whereas for boys wet nurses would be hired to care for them at home, is clearly an indication of the different value the two genders had in Florence’s Renaissance society (Klapisch-Zuber 1980). Up until the sixteenth century in France, only noble families would resort to the services of wet nurses, but during the seventeenth century, their use spread even among bourgeois families. As occurred in Florence in the fifteenth and in London in the seventeenth centuries, it is the account books kept by fathers and heads of families that give us information on the employment and remuneration of wet nurses. For example, Samuel Robert, a Protestant from Saintes, in Aquitaine, who married in 1639, in 1640 had a son, Jehan, who was given to Guillemette Audoüyn, wife of a master carpenter and living in the same parish, to be nursed for 60 livres per year; in 1642, a second son, Hélye, was born; he was sent to be nursed by the wife of a master mason, Michelle Chobellet, who lived in a nearby parish, for 48 livres per year. This sum, however, was never paid, since shortly afterwards, “the baby died, between midnight and one o’clock, and was buried in the cemetery of Saint-Vivien”. In 1643 and 1644, two girls were born, Jehanne and Magdelayne, both sent, in subsequent years, to the countryside, to one Jehanne Estourneau, a farmer’s wife, who lived in a village two miles away from the city: for the first baby girl, a wage of 36 livres and a pair of shoes a year were agreed and, for the second one, 48 livres per year. In this case, too, the girls were sent to the countryside and therefore parents had less opportunity to check upon the wet nurse and follow their daughters’ education, whereas the boys had remained within reach and sight. Two more boys followed: Pierre, born in 1646 and entrusted to Jehanne Robert, wife of the sergeant of the citadel, for 48 livres per year, died in 1649, and Daniel, born in 1648, who died even before being handed over to his wet nurse. In 1650, Magdelayne also died. A slaughter of the innocent, in other words, rather frequent at the time, and at the origin of the bad reputation of wet nurses, accused of not taking good enough care of the infants (Gélis et al. 1978: 156). During the eighteenth century, in France, wet nursing spread through all social classes, even among artisans. In Paris, in 1780, out of 21,000

138 

A. Bellavitis

children born every year, fewer than 1000 were breastfed by their mothers, 1000 by wet nurses who lived in their employers’ homes and all the others, that is 19,000 newborns, were sent to be wet nursed in the suburbs, in the countryside or in the surrounding region, even many miles away. By that time, entrusting one’s children to a wet nurse had become a question of social status whereas, for women labourers and craftswomen, it was rather a matter of being able to resume work as soon as possible, by offloading the care of their own children onto even poorer women (Gélis et al. 1978). In Lyon, the silk workers, subjected to harsh working conditions that undermined their health, resorted to wet nursing for their children in large numbers. In Turin, the Ospedale di Carità (Charity Hospital) offered mothers the opportunity of giving their children to wet nurses: between 1785 and 1792, more than 14 per cent of women who were either married, widowed or had been abandoned by their husbands with newborn babies asked for a wet nurse provided by the Hospital. They were mostly seamstresses, washerwomen, pressers and labourers, who paid about five lire a month, of which only two were then given to the wet nurses by the hospital, for this service. Wet nursing could also be provided free of charge, if a surgeon claimed that a mother could not breastfeed. But it was also a way to relieve a woman in difficulty, as shown for example by the petition of a young pregnant dressmaker with a four-month-old baby boy who, in 1778, declared that until then the child had been raised in her father-in-law’s house, but that however, as he was already burdened with eight other children, he could no longer keep him (Zucca Micheletto 2008). Public wet nursing offices tasked with recruiting wet nurses at the request of families existed in many European cities, such as Paris, Verona, Lyon, Stockholm and Hamburg. According to the 1685 regulations, the Paris office was run by two recommandaresses, women who were supposed to provide accommodation for the wet nurses who came from surrounding villages and the countryside to collect the children. They arrived furnished with a parish priest’s certificate, attesting as to their good conduct, marital status (naturally they had to be married), the number and ages of their children. Following the 1715 law, the first to include the protection of children as its stated objective, four wet nursing offices under the jurisdiction of the Police were set up. The law also prescribed that wet nurses

  Caring and Feeding 

139

could not take on more than one baby at a time, that they had to inform the baby’s parents within two months if they became pregnant and that they should take the babies back to Paris only if ordered by the parents or the Police. Subsequent laws defined the roles of the meneurs and meneuses, that is the men and women who brought the wet nurses to the city, and specified the wet nurses’ duties: they were required to go and collect the children from Paris in person and, if the babies died, to notify their families within two weeks. Penalties were also imposed on wet nurses who were shown to be responsible for the deaths of newborns. In this regard, a rule from 1756 forbade wet nurses from sleeping in the same bed as their children, and charged the recommanderesse with ascertaining, through a parish priest’s certificate, that the wet nurse possessed a cradle. The health of the children sent to wet nurses came increasingly under scrutiny: in 1762, for example, it was decreed that wet nurses’ milk should not be more than two years old and that, at the parents’ request, wet nurses had to undergo a medical examination. But the good health of the wet nurses’ own children was also cause for concern, so the same law prescribed that their milk should not be less than six months old. Overall, this was a very complex system, based on urban police rules, registrations and increasing controls and which involved, in addition to wet nurses, other women in professional roles, such as the recommanderesses and the meneuses (Fields 1988). The problem of the mortality of children entrusted to wet nurses, increasingly felt in Europe during the Enlightenment, was also tackled by employing wet nurses who lived with the children’s families, rather than forcing newborns to make dangerous journeys, in order to go and live far from their families. This trend, which became more established during the nineteenth century, caused some migratory movement of wet nurses to the cities, and some regional specialisations: in Germany, for instance, wet nurses came from Saxony, in Paris from Normandy and, in Venice, from the mountains of Friuli or the Feltre area. In Madrid, they came from the Pas valley, in the Santander area, so in Spanish pasiega became synonymous with wet nurse. The Madrid press of the time, with a mixture of admiration and dismay, described the lives of these women who, often in small groups, would undertake the long journey to the capital,

140 

A. Bellavitis

taking a newborn with them, whom they breastfed in turn in order to stop their own milk from drying up and who, “walking during the day, and sleeping at night on the hard ground”, would “make their journey. But their good health, resilience and strength are such they put up with everything, arriving in Madrid as ruddy and fresh as if they had not suffered any hardship”. The recruitment took place as a sort of human market on the square of Santa Cruz, where wet nurses waited to be hired, or through advertisements in the local press. The offer was higher, and the wages consequently lower, in the winter months, when there was no agricultural work, and fell during the summer. Once hired, however, wet nurses received relatively high wages: in the second half of the eighteenth century, their wages were between 60 and 150 reales per month, the equivalent of up to 1800 reales per year, whereas a mason could get up to 2800 reales, an apprentice bricklayer 1600 and a carpenter’s apprentice 2000. In Madrid, in the eighteenth century, good wages for a woman were therefore equivalent to the wages of a male apprentice (Sarasúa 2001: 35). Many wet nurses were hired by the institutions that took in abandoned children, which were founded very early on in Italy, at the end of the Middle Ages. Their example was then followed by other European countries especially in the eighteenth century. In Porto’s orphanage, which was set up in 1689, there were in-house wet nurses, who took care of newborn babies left at the baby hatch, and external wet nurses, who raised the children in the villages around the town, up to the age of seven. When required by the number of children admitted, the orphanage would hire additional in-house wet nurses. In the eighteenth century, urban wet nurses were mostly craftsmen’s wives (73 per cent), who received remunerations comparable to those of skilled workers. A small group of wet nurses lived in London’s orphanage, founded in 1739, but most of the children were sent to wet nurses living in the countryside around London, or even further, who were craftsmen’s, labourers’ and rural servants’ wives. The London wet nurses were well paid too: the equivalent of a day-labourer’s wages (Sarasúa 1994: 141–142). Many of the wet nurses living in the foundlings’ hospitals were in fact the mothers who had abandoned their infants at the hatch or door of the institution

  Caring and Feeding 

141

and then remained there to breastfeed them. In the records of the Hospital of San Marcello in Vicenza we read: 1719, September 26, at 11 and ½ hours. On the doorstep with the bell a child was left in rags. 1719, month as above 26, a mother came to ask for a child to be wet nursed and we discovered that the baby is her son and son of Pietro dal Pozzo, she lives by the Padua gate and says he is called Bartolamio. (De Gregorio 1997: 147)

Others, on the other hand, were forcibly recruited from the pregnant women who could not pay the hospital fee, with the exception, as stated in the regulations of the Great Hospital of San Marco in Bergamo, of “wives or other dependants of soldiers”, considered at risk of being affected by syphilis (Schiavini Trezzi 1997). At the Domus Pietatis in Verona, up until the 1760s, wet nurses who took care of children until they were aged 18 months received a monthly fee of 100 soldi; from 18 to 36 months the monthly fee went down to 40 soldi and, from 36 months to 9 years of age, to 25 soldi. If we consider that in 1626 the monthly wages received by peasants in the area amounted to about 160 soldi, and that the average price of a minale of wheat (28.60 kg) was 124 soldi and, in 1629, 236 soldi, we understand that the wages of wet nurses were an important contribution for peasants’ families (Garbellotti 1997). In Bergamo, in the Great Hospital of San Marco, the children left at night at the hatch or brought by midwives during the day were baptised and given to the in-house wet nurses. After a few days, they were sent to the external wet nurses, whose remuneration, in the eighteenth century, was: up to the child’s second birthday, they received 25 lire per year, in addition to swaddling and linen and wool clothes for the baby and, for the following five years, the cash fee was replaced by 12 bushels of wheat or 16 bushels of a mixture consisting of three-quarters millet and a quarter rye. Subsequently, the hospital subsidies were diversified according to gender, continuing up to 12 years of age for boys but only up to 10 for girls “having judged that at that age less expense and greater service can be had from girls than from boys”, as we can read in contemporary legislation. The resources received by wet nurses were then progressively reduced: 12 bushels of mixture in the eighth year, 8 in the ninth and only 6 in the tenth, whereas for boys they received 12 bushels in the eighth year

142 

A. Bellavitis

and 8 in the next four. In addition, both boys and girls received clothing “appropriate to their status”, so, as the compiler of the hospital regulations wrote: And despite the fact that for the first two years, when breastfeeding, the twenty-five lire a year seem a small fee, nevertheless, generally for the rest of the time for which the said boys or girls are left in their care, those poor people are greatly helped, and therefore we are never short of wet nurses coming to ask for some children. (Schiavini Trezzi 1997: 117–118)

The wages of wet nurses in institutions, although always low, were often indispensable for survival, to the extent that, during the French Revolution, when the hospitals for abandoned children found themselves in financial difficulty, as they had to cope with an exponential increase in foundlings due to the war-like situation, the wet nurses from various French cities took to the streets, stormed the hospital, threatening to strike and stop feeding the children (Groppi 1979). Of course, the political climate was very particular, lending itself to such explosions of popular anger, and this may be the only case of a wet nurses’ ‘strike’ in history, but it well conveys the idea that the wet nurse’s was a real ‘job’, on which many women and their families relied on.

Notes 1. ASVE: Compilazione Leggi, Prima serie (Venice State Archives: Collection of laws, First series, b. 47, cc. 242v e 243). 2. ASVE: Compilazione Leggi, Prima serie (Venice State Archives: Collection of laws, First series, b. 47, c. 633).

References Broomhall, S. (2003). Women’s Medical Care in Early Modern France. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Carré, J.  (2005). Hospital Nurses in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Service Without Responsibility. In I. Baudino, J. Carré, & C. Révauger (Eds.), The

  Caring and Feeding 

143

Invisible Woman. Aspects of Women’s Work in Eighteenth-Century Britain (pp. 89–100). London/New York: Routledge. d’Amelia, M. (1999). Diventare madre nel XVII secolo. L’esperienza di una nobile romana. In S. Seidel Menchi, A. Jacobson Schutte, & T. Kuehn (Eds.), Tempi e spazi di vita femminile tra Medioevo ed età moderna (pp. 279–310). Bologna: Il Mulino. De Gregorio, M.  L. (1997). I libri Ruota dell’Ospedale di San Marcello a Vicenza nel secolo XVIII. In C. Grandi (Ed.), Benedetto chi ti porta, maledetto chi ti manda. L’infanzia abbandonata nel Triveneto (secoli XV–XIX) (pp. 144–151). Treviso: Edizioni Fondazione Benetton/Canova. Fields, V. (1988). Wet Nursing. A History from Antiquity to the Present. Oxford/ New York: Basil Blackwell. Garbellotti, M. (1997). Un brefotrofio per la città: la Domus Pietatis di Verona (secoli XVII–XIX). In C. Grandi (Ed.), Benedetto chi ti porta, maledetto chi ti manda. L’infanzia abbandonata nel Triveneto (secoli XV–XIX) (pp. 197–211). Treviso: Edizioni Fondazione Benetton/Canova. Gélis, J., Laget, M., & Morel, M.  F. (1978). Entrer dans la vie. Naissances et enfances dans la France traditionnelle. Paris: Gallimard. Groppi, A. (1979). Le travail des femmes à Paris à l’époque de la Révolution française. Bulletin d’histoire économique et sociale de la Révolution française, 27–49. Klapisch-Zuber, C. (1980). Genitori naturali e genitori da latte nella Firenze del Quattrocento. Quaderni Storici, 44, XV(2), 543–563. Perry, E. (1990). Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rey Castelao, O. (2010). Trabajando a cubierto. Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, 40(2). http://mcv.revues.org/3575 Sarasúa, C. (1994). Criados, nodrizas y amos. In El servicio doméstico en la formación del mercado de trabajo madrileño, 1758–1868. Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno de España Editores, S.A. Sarasúa, C. (2001). Leaving Home to Help Family? Male and Female Temporary Migrants in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Spain. In P. Sharpe (Ed.), Women, Gender and Labour Migration (pp.  29–59). Abingdon/New York: Routledge. Scherman, M. (2014). La variété des rémunérations à Trévise au XVe siècle. In P. Beck, P. Bernardi, & L. Feller (Eds.), Rémunérer le travail au Moyen Âge. Pour une histoire sociale du salariat (pp. 286–295). Paris: Picard. Schiavini Trezzi, J. (1997). Per la storia dell’assistenza agli esposti in Bergamo. L’Ospedal Grande di San Marco (secoli XV–XVIII). In C.  Grandi (Ed.),

144 

A. Bellavitis

Benedetto chi ti porta, maledetto chi ti manda. L’infanzia abbandonata nel Triveneto (secoli XV–XIX) (pp.  115–131). Treviso: Edizioni Fondazione Benetton/Canova. Whaley, L. (2011). Women and the Practice of Medical Care in Early Modern Europe (pp. 1400–1800). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wiesner, M.  E. (1999). Having Her Own Smoke. Employment and Independence for Singlewomen in Germany, 1400–1750. In J. M. Bennett & A.  M. Froide (Eds.), Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800 (pp. 192–216). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Zucca Micheletto, B. (2008). Lavoro, figli ed economia domestica nella Torino di Antico Regime. Genesis, VII(1–2), 165–192.

10 Midwives

A typically feminine activity that, during the early modern age, became heavily formalised and was subjected to ever tighter institutional control, both at local and state levels, is that of the midwife. The reasons behind this development are many: it was a matter of ensuring that reproduction occurred in the best possible conditions, but also of avoiding abortions and infanticide by subjecting traditional women’s practices and knowledge to ever stricter control. The first treatises on obstetrics written by physicians in the sixteenth century insisted on the practices of midwives as tainted by witchcraft, and, in some cases, even by heresy. This emerges in particular where different religious traditions coexisted, with varying levels of tolerance: in sixteenth-century Spain, midwives from the Moorish community, that is of converted Muslims, were particularly suspicious, despite being communities whose medical knowledge was highly developed and recognised as very effective even among the Christian population. Both in Protestant and in Catholic countries, the main concern of the authorities was the prevention of abortions and infanticide and a respectable midwife who, in a trial for infanticide, declared that the child had been born prematurely or stillborn could save a woman from the gallows. While it is true that midwives were entrusted with the ­important © The Author(s) 2018 A. Bellavitis, Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96541-3_10

145

146 

A. Bellavitis

and delicate tasks of preventing abortions, by reminding women of the criminal consequences of their actions, and of reporting them, when they had not succeeded in avoiding them, it must also be said that the authorities were very aware of the part they could also play in carrying out or facilitating abortions, abandonments and infanticide. However, in practice, the midwives accused of contributing to abortions and to practices bordering on witchcraft were not so numerous in European courts, contrary to what might appear judging not by the legal sources but by the treatises on Satanism and witchcraft (Perry 1990). From the end of the Middle Ages, many European cities, particularly in Flanders, southern Germany and northern Italy, had designated municipal midwives, who were paid by the town community to meet the needs of women from all walks of life. The establishment of municipal midwives entailed the imposition of a series of rules issued by the city authorities, whose main purpose was to set the boundary between the activities of midwives and those of doctors or surgeons (Gélis 1988). The extensive research recently devoted to midwives in various countries and cities in early modern Europe shows a rather diversified picture: although there was a widespread tendency to progressively transfer midwifery skills to male doctors, this cannot be said to apply to the whole of Europe and, for example, in Holland, in some areas of the Holy Roman Empire and, to a certain extent, even in Italy, midwives retained their control over childbirth throughout the early modern age. Beyond the specific issue of the expropriation by official science of traditional knowledge which had hitherto belonged to women, the question of the ‘public’ prerogatives given to those responsible for bringing children into the world is particularly important. During the early modern period, these prerogatives became more and more complex, as a consequence of the development of population-control institutions and practices, but also following the transformations in the relationships between secular and religious institutions in early modern Europe. The case of the cities of the Holy Roman Empire between the Middle Ages and the early modern age is indicative: in Munich, an ordinance from 1468 prescribed that if a midwife feared for the newborn’s life, she had to baptise the infant or “she would have to answer to God for her laziness and irresponsibility”. A century later, in 1585, in Württemberg, a region which

 Midwives 

147

included Stuttgart and its neighbouring villages, an ordinance specified that midwives had to go to the local church pastor to learn the correct way to administer a baptism (Wiesner 1993: 79). Even in Catholic countries, midwives had to baptise newborns if they feared for their lives and, after the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church became very interested in their activities: the parish priests’ obligation to correctly instruct midwives on the rite of baptism was reiterated on several occasions and, in 1614, bishops were ordered to check upon the work of midwives during their pastoral visits (Filippini 1993). In the Catholic area it was possible, if the rite had not been correctly performed, to have a child baptised again by a priest. This was not permitted in Lutheran communities, where the repetition of baptism was associated with the Anabaptist heresy. Here, therefore, midwives had an even more important role, endowed with public value. However, in 1688, the Strasbourg authorities decided that midwives had to seek permission from the town authorities before administering a baptism, a provision that appears in stark contrast to the very notion of an ‘emergency baptism’ allowed by the previous rules and which shows the desire on the part of the authorities to limit the public role of midwives. Above all, it was important that this desire be put in black and white, but, in practice, it had only marginal application (Wiesner 1993: 86). Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, increasing moral concerns were at the root of a new task entrusted to midwives, that is the denunciation of illegitimate births, by every possible means. According to an ordinance issued in 1605  in Strasbourg, midwives who helped unmarried women to give birth had to report to the authorities “the name of the man who was called during the pains of childbirth”. In the same city, in 1688, a combination of moralism, a duty to protect single women and economic concerns were at the root of a new norm, which imposed on midwives to subordinate their duty to assist pregnant women to their “policing” duties: midwives who were called to the bedside of unmarried women, “before assisting them”, had to ask them “who the father was, so as to abide by justice and prevent a child, of whom someone might have taken care, from ending up in an orphanage” (Wiesner 1993). Similar rules are found in England, where midwives were subject to the control of the Anglican ecclesiastical authorities. They were ­responsible

148 

A. Bellavitis

for collecting the statements of mothers on the paternity of newborns and could be called to testify in court even when couples were accused of premarital sexual relations: a declaration that a newborn displayed all signs of being premature could save a mother’s honour, even if she was legally married. In the oath they had to take prior to taking office, midwives undertook to assist rich and poor alike, to report illegitimate births, not to perform abortions, not to use spells or sorcery, not to use instruments that might maim a foetus, to comply with the rite of baptism and to inform the religious authorities about every baptism they administered. However, since it was a midwife’s duty to ensure a newborn was baptised, in non-Anglican communities (e.g. Catholics, Presbyterians, Quakers) people needed tolerant midwives they could rely on, or if possible, one who shared their religious beliefs. In the mid-seventeenth century, a commitment to report midwives who practised without a licence was added to the oath but, in the eighteenth century, the instructions about baptism were removed, while the commitment to report unlicensed midwives took on a central role (Evenden 2000). In Burgundy and in Alsace and Lorraine, the municipal authorities hired as midwives women who had already delivered babies, either for free or in exchange for a small fee or gifts. In Lille, after an investigation into their competence in matters of childbirth, the city’s aldermen hired the midwives during a public ceremony; in the Swiss towns, the municipal council chose from the women who had followed an apprenticeship with one of the city’s midwives (Gélis 1988). In the cities of southern Germany, from the sixteenth century onwards, some ‘honourable women’ belonging to the city’s patrician classes were charged with conducting the midwives’ examinations. They were assisted by city doctors, although, in the training of doctors, pregnancy and childbirth featured very little. Even midwives who intended to practise privately had to take the examination and swear an oath. During the exam, the doctors asked technical questions, while the “honourable women” probed the candidate’s morality. In 1549, however, in Nuremberg, midwives complained that the “honourable women” refused to assist them in helping the poor and asked that they be replaced by women from the artisan class, in other words from their own social class (Wiesner 1993: 79).

 Midwives 

149

In the book recording the wages paid by the municipal authorities of southern German towns, midwives’ wages were entered immediately after surgeons and pharmacists, but their wages were much lower: between 2 and 8 florins a year, whereas municipal barbers-surgeons earned from 10 to 25 florins. The wages of midwives were comparable to those of the employees of the city hospitals, but they also received board and lodging, unlike the midwives, who therefore could not survive on their wages and sometimes had to resort to municipal welfare institutions. On the other hand, when they practised independently, midwives asked their patients for remunerations comparable to those demanded by barber-surgeons (Wiesner 1993). The municipal authorities also paid charity midwives working with the poor on the basis of an annual remuneration commensurate with the number of childbirths attended. In Amiens, in the eighteenth century, the rate was two lire per delivery, provided the midwife presented a certificate signed by the new mother’s husband and countersigned by the parish priest who had baptised the newborn. In Langres, Burgundy, at the end of the seventeenth century, the city imposed on newly weds a tax to support the municipal midwife. Municipal midwives, except the ones working with the poor, in addition to their wages, also received a retirement pension and, ever since the fourteenth century, in some cities there were midwives who, during periods of epidemics, assisted sick women in childbirth. They had to wear a red dress, like the doctors assisting plague victims: in Bruges, in 1489, there were three; in Dijon, we find one in 1553 and, in the cities of Flanders, this office existed until 1670. In addition to these institutional figures, there continued to be independent midwives who, in the smallest towns, occasionally practised a profession they could not live on, whilst they continued to carry out other activities, such as sewing, spinning or weaving (Gélis 1988). In London, in the seventeenth century, to obtain a ‘licence’, a midwife had to present to the bishop’s court the declaration of six women, who testified as to the candidate’s skills and experience. In many cases, they were women who had been assisted in childbirth by her. Moreover, testimonies by a parish priest, or by her neighbours, as to her morality and good behaviour were also required. The women who applied to the court in the second half of the seventeenth century could often prove that they

150 

A. Bellavitis

had practised for several years, supervised by older midwives. In the case of England, we cannot speak of a formalised apprenticeship but, in some cases, the witnesses speak of a seven-year period of practice. The licence, however, was not cheap, costing between £1 and £2, the equivalent of a London building worker’s wages for eight to ten days’ work. In seventeenth-­century London, midwives were middle-class women of a certain age, the wives or widows of craftsmen and traders, often the daughters or granddaughters of midwives. They did not receive regular wages but were paid for every delivery, by the women they assisted or, if the latter did not have the means or if they were women passing through, by the parish. The fees varied according to the wealth of the women in labour, but they allowed them a comfortable lifestyle, attested in account books, inventories and wills (Evenden 2000; Harley 1993). In Paris, every midwife had her own street sign and was assisted by an apprentice. Her work was closely monitored by the city’s authorities, because it was often the midwife who, if necessary and after having them baptised, took newborns to be abandoned to the hospital of the Enfants trouvés. In the cities and villages of north-eastern France, municipal midwives had folding delivery chairs they could carry to pregnant women’s homes. Municipal midwives signed a contract that stipulated their annual wages: on average, in the seventeenth century, 50 livres and, in the eighteenth century, 80, a modest fee, which could however be increased, in recognition of special merits or skills. Midwives often also received remunerations in kind, such as wheat or wood, in addition to any gifts from the families of the pregnant women. They were subject to checks by the doctors and surgeons of the Châtelet Court, before swearing their oaths with the authorities. During the seventeenth century, checks on the training of midwives became more frequent and the edict of 1692 ordered surgeons to organise themselves in an association on the basis of statutes which also included the rules for the admission of midwives. The new statutes of the province’s surgeons, in 1730, distinguished different ways to be admitted, according to the size and juridical status of the town, or village, where midwives were called to practise (Gélis 1988). The advances in medical science, and the eighteenth-century concerns to increase the birth rate, led to greater control of midwives. In France, this materialised in the so-called mission of Madame du Coudray, a

 Midwives 

151

­ idwife who, in 1759, obtained a royal authorisation to teach midwifery m throughout France with the help of a dummy she had designed by herself. A successful businesswoman, Madame du Coudray published a manual for midwives, sold her machine for 300 livres and received from the government an annual salary of 8000 livres, and then a pension of 3000, until her death in 1792. Despite a defamatory campaign organised by a group of doctors, Madame du Coudray disseminated her knowledge throughout the country, founding midwifery schools in many towns. From 1760, about 200 “demonstrators”, authorised by the Intendance, travelled through France to teach the birthing techniques, thanks to the dummy. The demonstrators were surgeons a part from five women, who were wives or daughters of surgeons. Madame du Coudray’s ‘mission’ was a fundamental turning point in the role of midwives in society and in the community: they were much better trained, and they had to know how to read and write or at least undertake to learn to read and write. Courses were no longer aimed at old village matrons, but to younger, middle-class women with a good reputation, whose training was paid for by their village community, who chose the women to send to the courses, usually in the nearest town (Gélis 1988; Gelbart 1993). In Venice, too, the turning point came at the end of the eighteenth century, with the establishment of the midwifery school. Since the early decades of the seventeenth century, all those who wanted to practise the profession of midwife had to take an exam and enrol in a special register. Over the century, the skills required of candidates became more specific, in particular they needed to be able to read, have attended dissections of the female reproductive organs and have practised alongside an ‘approved’ midwife. From 1719, a certificate of baptism and a declaration by the parish priest vouching for a midwife’s ability to administer it was required. In 1770, when the midwifery school was founded, surgeons took over the training, and the use of surgical instruments and administering medicines by mouth was forbidden to midwives. However, the encounters between the theoretical knowledge of medicine and the practical knowledge of midwives were far from easy, and teachers complained about the irregular attendance and lack of motivation of students who could barely read and write. Little by little, midwives were forbidden to carry out procedures, such as the manual turning of a foetus in a difficult presentation,

152 

A. Bellavitis

which were often indispensable in childbirth, thus requiring the intervention of surgeons. The petitions that some midwives addressed to the Venetian authorities at the end of the eighteenth century insisted, on the other hand, on the need to allow these types of intervention in home deliveries, as almost all of them at that time were performed in order to avoid potentially dangerous delays both for the mother and for the child. The alternative they had was to carry out the procedures anyway, breaking the law and running the risk of being banned from practice. Overall, however, the Italian case shows some peculiar features, in that it was the Church that, for moral reasons, opposed the presence of male doctors during childbirth, thus contributing to delaying, even though they could not stop it, the transfer of skills and responsibilities from midwives to obstetricians (Filippini 1985, 1993, 1995, 2017). In Spain, on the other hand, the doctors’ control over the midwives’ activities began at the end of the fifteenth century. In 1477, a royal decree gave the protomédicos—that is royal doctors and the highest medical authorities in the kingdom—the task of examining the midwives who applied for a licence to practise, but, from 1523 onwards, the examination was limited to physicians, surgeons, barbers and pharmacists, excluding midwives, who were to be examined by local doctors. In Zaragoza, in the seventeenth century, the College of Physicians was responsible for the training and examination of midwives, who had to be Christian, over the age of 35, and have practised for four years as apprentices of a licensed midwife. During the eighteenth century, the requirement to attend several hours of lessons at the College of Surgeons was added. The Barcelona Ordinance of 1795 specified that candidates had to attend an hour and a half of lessons a day for two months, be over 25 years old, widows or, if they were married, had to have their husbands’ written permission, in addition to “purity of their blood-line” and “respectability” certificates. In the oath they took at the time of admission, they pledged not to give medicines that had not been prescribed by a doctor or a surgeon, not to operate alone in cases of difficult births, but to “call a professor able to do such operations, if he is close and close at hand; to do caesarean sections on dead women, if there is no one else who can do it”. There was no decree explicitly forbidding women from becoming surgeons, but it was simply impossible to do so, since surgeons had to know Latin, algebra,

 Midwives 

153

logic and physics. But it was equally impossible for a man to become an obstetrician if he was not already a surgeon. Even in Spain, the midwives’ range of interventions was theoretically reduced, even if in practice the chronic lack of surgeons left them some room for manoeuvre for a long time (Ortiz 1993: 101). In England, too, the eighteenth century saw the success of obstetrician-­ surgeons, first in emergency cases but, since the 1720s, even in normal births. Furthermore, the ‘licensing’ system for midwives, described above, fell into disuse, along with other practices dependent on the ecclesiastical courts. In the early modern age, that of the midwife was a prestigious profession, chosen by middle-class women, but, during the eighteenth century, educated and respectable women moved away from it, while at the same time the advances in medical science pushed the middle class and nobility to choose the path of ‘modernity’: only in the countryside and in villages did midwives retain their role and prestige (Harley 1993). The development described so far had some exceptions: this is the case of a small German capital, Brunswick, where, in the eighteenth century, doctors limited themselves to examining the candidates for a midwife licence, without replacing them, and where the conflict was rather between licensed midwives and their assistants and apprentices who aspired to practise the trade with the same guarantees and remuneration (Lindemann 1993). This is above all true of Holland, where this professional figure was institutionalised much later, so that, when, in the rest of Europe, the figure of the midwife was suffering a decline in terms of social recognition, in Holland a body of licensed and trained midwives was just coming together. The first examples of regulation of the profession and of organised training dated back to the mid-seventeenth century and extended to most Dutch cities at the beginning of the following century. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, obstetricians also appeared, but unlike the rest of Europe, midwives continued to assist even in difficult deliveries and were paid more than obstetricians. Licensed municipal midwives and independent midwives coexisted, with the latter mainly working in the countryside and causing concern to the authorities and their frequent, though ineffective, attempts to control them. The difference lay in the type of training, since the former followed an apprenticeship and attended some lessons in obstetrics and an anatomical

154 

A. Bellavitis

dissection, whereas the latter acquired their practical knowledge from older midwives, but the outcome could be entirely similar. An unusual example of an ‘unlicensed’ midwife is that of Catarina Schrader, who began to practise the profession after the death of her husband, who was a surgeon. In her diary, written between the end of the seventeenth century and the 1740s, she wrote she had attended more than 3000 births in 50 years, managing, in some difficult deliveries, to save both mother and baby, despite a surgeon’s fruitless attempts (Marland 1993). From 1668, in Amsterdam, to become a midwife an exam before the college of obstetricians and the “anatomy reader” had to be taken, after an apprenticeship with a midwife lasting at least two years. From 1679, anatomy courses also became mandatory for midwives who wanted to practise in the city and a four-year training period was imposed. Similar rules were issued in Rotterdam, Leiden, Groningen, and Utrecht. In some cases, as in Enkhuizen, it was necessary to be part of the reformed Protestant Church, and in Zwolle there was resistance to the recruitment of Catholic midwives. In line with the organisation and regulation of the midwife’s profession, the cost of apprenticeships also grew: in the mid-­ eighteenth century, in Haarlem, one year’s apprenticeship cost 30 florins, two years of theoretical lessons 100 and the examination 15. The licence fee also increased sharply: in Amsterdam, it went from 25 florins in 1703 to 100 in 1786. All the eighteenth-century regulations insisted that midwives were not allowed to use surgical instruments and that in cases of difficult deliveries they had to call an obstetrician, but at least two women, the Van Putten sisters, were granted the title of obstetrician at the end of the eighteenth century by feminising the male formula, vroedmeester, to vroedmeestere. Elisabeth (1755–1848) passed the examination to be admitted to the Rotterdam Guild of Surgeons in 1773, in the same year when her father was elected director of the Guild, and was granted the title of vroedmeestere, authorising her to use tools such as forceps. Her sister Neeltje (1761–1828) followed the same path a few years later, going as far as writing scientific articles (Marland 1993). In the early modern age, the advances in anatomical and medical knowledge, the channelling of religious observance through the mechanisms of government and the increase in the power of the state caused an increasingly rigid and effective control over ancient knowledge handed

 Midwives 

155

down from woman to woman which had been the foundation of a profession that gave women authority and power in the community. However, some opportunities remained available, both because the main stakeholders, that is the pregnant women, asked to be assisted by other women, and because the midwives themselves had the ability and the foresight to adapt their work to the requests coming from the institutions, and also to take advantage of new techniques and knowledge.

References Evenden, D. (2000). The Midwives of Seventeenth Century London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Filippini, N.  M. (1985). Levatrici e ostetricanti a Venezia tra ’700 e ’800. Quaderni storici, 58, XX(1), 149–180. Filippini, N. M. (1993). The Church, the State and Childbirth: The Midwife in Italy During the 18th Century. In H. Marland (Ed.), The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe (pp.  152–175). London/New York: Routledge. Filippini, N. M. (1995). La nascita straordinaria. Tra madre e figlio, la rivoluzione del taglio cesareo (secc. XVIII–XIX). Milan: Franco Angeli. Filippini, N. M. (2017). Generare, partorire, nascere. Una storia dall’antichità alla provetta. Rome: Viella. Gelbart, N. (1993). Midwife to a Nation: Mme du Coudray serves France. In H. Marland (Ed.), The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe (pp. 131–151). London/New York: Routledge. Gélis, J. (1988). La sage femme et le médecin. Une nouvelle conception de la vie. Paris: Fayard. Harley, D. (1993). Provincial Midwives in Lancashire and Cheshire, 1660–1760. In H. Marland (Ed.), The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe (pp. 27–48). London/New York: Routledge. Lindemann, M. (1993). Professionals? Sisters? Rivals? Midwives in Braunschweig, 1750–1800. In H.  Marland (Ed.), The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe (pp. 176–191). London/New York: Routledge. Marland, H. (1993). The “Burgerlijke” Midwife. The Stadsvroedvrouw of Eighteenth-Century Holland. In H. Marland (Ed.), The Art of Midwifery : Early Modern Midwives in Europe (pp.  192–213). London/New York: Routledge.

156 

A. Bellavitis

Ortiz, T. (1993). From Hegemony to Subordination: Midwives in Early Modern Spain. In H. Marland (Ed.), The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe (pp. 95–114). London/New York: Routledge. Perry, E. (1990). Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wiesner, M. E. (1993). The Midwives of South Germany and the Public/Private Dichotomy. In H.  Marland (Ed.), The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe (pp. 77–94). London/New York: Routledge.

11 Bodies as Resources

As the last example of female occupation we have chosen “the oldest profession in the world”. Prostitution is a very singular ‘profession’ that causes complex and contradictory emotional responses and interests, even in women and feminists. Is it the worst possible form of exploitation, an activity that no woman would ever decide to get involved in if she were not forced into it or, conversely, is it a job like any other, which can generate a decent income? Are they harlots or courtesans? We shall not engage with this particular debate, preferring to show, in the pages that follow, how selling one’s body and sexuality has represented, and still represents, a ‘resource’, and that this is one of the female jobs which caused most interventions by institutions, and not necessarily exclusively repressive ones (Ferrante 1996). “Poor gender, with misfortune / always generated, so that you may always be subordinate / and deprived of freedom! // But it was certainly not a flaw of ours, / because, although we’re not as strong as men, / as men we have mind and intellect” (Rosenthal 1992: 238). This was written by Venetian citizen Veronica Franco (1546–1591): an “honest courtesan” who was one of most highly paid, according to the Tariffa delle puttane di Venezia (price list of Venetian whores) and had the honour of “lovingly entertaining” a young Henry III of Valois, king of Poland and © The Author(s) 2018 A. Bellavitis, Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96541-3_11

157

158 

A. Bellavitis

future king of France, when he travelled through Venice. She wrote letters and poems, standing against Venetian patricians in poetry competitions, but she was also called a “public and low witch and whore” when accused by the Inquisition of practising love witchcraft and eating meat on Fridays. Veronica Franco had not chosen her profession and, although she came from a bourgeois family, she had been initiated into the profession by her mother. At the end of her life, she founded an institution which admitted prostitutes who wanted to change their lives, and their children: an institution of a new kind, which was not exclusively for young virgins, nor required a “strict and austere lifestyle”, but offered those who wanted to retire “from ill-doing”, an “honest place, where they could take shelter and with their children support themselves” (Schiavon 2014: 59). In the early modern age, women who lived on the street, with no fixed abode, who worked sporadically in agriculture or, in the cities, found occasional jobs as domestic workers or labourers, could easily end up “on the game”. During every period of crisis, when harvests were poor and wars ravaged the countryside, poverty spread rapidly and prostitution increased. In cases such as these, prostitution can actually be seen as a resource available to young women and exploited by older women, perhaps by offering the younger women a roof or a bed from which to perform their paid work. The women accused of prostitution often lived with other women and supplemented the low pay obtained from a respectable manual job, but prostitution was not necessarily an illegal activity and, in Italian cities, all one had to do was enrol on the registers of public prostitutes and pay taxes (Ferrante 1996). The theory according to which prostitution restricted sexual disorders to a limited part of the population was officially championed by the Church at the end of the Middle Ages and was accompanied by a certain tolerance towards sexual relations between consenting adults even if they were not married. Paying prostitutes was also legal and sometimes justified as a kind of gift. At the end of the Middle Ages, the Church accepted the existence of prostitution and the European cities ran brothels and required all prostitutes registered with the municipal offices, such as the Ufficio delle Bollette in Bologna or the Ufficio dell’Onestà in Florence, to pay taxes, pursuing those who were not registered (Ferrante 1996). Nevertheless, it was still a socially stigmatised activity and even Veronica

  Bodies as Resources 

159

Franco was treated with contempt and derided in sixteenth-century Venice, one of the places and perhaps the place where prostitution was more widespread, tolerated and at certain times even encouraged by the city authorities in order to combat male homosexuality (Scarabello 2006). In Rome, given the high percentage of male population and the constant influx of pilgrims, prostitution was widespread and, at the end of the fifteenth century, prostitutes paid a tax of one gold giulio to the Camera Apostolica, for an estimated total of 20,000 ducats per year. The tax served as a licence to practise the profession, and was added to other taxes paid by prostitutes and destined for the Casa delle Convertite (House for ‘converted’ women), in addition to exceptional contributions, such as the one imposed in 1548 to replace the paving of the Santa Maria bridge. The literature of the time exaggerated the number of Roman prostitutes: there was talk of 6800 at the end of the fifteenth century, and even 30,000 prostitutes and 9000 female pimps in the 1520s. In fact, the population census of 1517–1518 recorded the presence of 193 prostitutes in the city, and that of 1527 of 26, out of a population of 60,000 inhabitants, with 2015 women as heads of households. In the first half of the seventeenth century, the number of prostitutes ranged between 604 and 1200; so, if we take the year 1600, this means there were 2.5 prostitutes for every 100 adult women (Storey 2008). The Counter-Reformation popes tried to contain the problem: one of the first decisions taken by Pius V (1566–1572) was to order the expulsion of prostitutes from the city or at least from the central districts and in particular from one where they were most numerous, the Borgo, near the Vatican, sending them to live in Trastevere. This was not the only initiative of this kind: Clement VIII (1592–1605) tried to set up a closed prostitution district, on the model of the ghettos that was becoming popular in the cities of the Papal State, but each of these measures was opposed by the municipal authorities and, more generally, by the population, with economic arguments: prostitution was a source of income for the city. Later population censuses show the partial success of papal policies, as prostitutes appeared to be concentrated in some areas, in particular Campo Marzio, including the parishes of San Lorenzo in Lucina, Sant’Andrea delle Fratte and Santa Maria del Popolo: in 1610, 10 per cent of the families in Santa Maria del Popolo included a prostitute. The

160 

A. Bellavitis

judicial sources, in Rome as in other Italian cities where prostitution was tolerated if practised within a specific institutional framework, document the lives of prostitutes who claimed to practise only occasionally. They were unmarried, but also married or widowed women, who, when talking about their occupations, used sentences like “I sew, spin, wash: I do what other women do”, even though they also had to admit to the occasional ‘slip’. As in other cities, they were mostly young women, and recently arrived. They were mostly poor, even though, out the prostitutes surveyed in Campo Marzio in 1656 (240 out of a total of 1138 in the city), 43 per cent were listed as “comfortable”, and the remaining 57 per cent as “poor”: none as “rich”, but none as “destitute” either (Storey 2008). In the past, as nowadays, prostitution was often the occupation of immigrant women: from the documents of the Ufficio dell’Onestà in Florence it appears that, in 1436, most prostitutes came from other states. Out of the 76 registered prostitutes, 26 came from the Netherlands, 16 from the Holy Roman Empire and 14 from northern Italy, whereas only one was registered as Florentine. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Ufficio dell’Onestà was subjected to increasingly stringent state control, in the context of the Medici’s policy of centralisation. Prostitutes were confined to some neighbourhoods and subjected to a tax, set in 1559, which benefited the Convento delle Convertite (Convent for ‘converted’ women), one of the many institutions founded in Counter-­ Reformation Italy to take in repentant prostitutes. Another tax, which affected the ‘rich’ ones, was imposed in 1584. To be able to collect them, a census of prostitutes was carried out, which identified three categories: rich, average and poor; 159 of the prostitutes registered in 1569 belonged to the last category and were concentrated in some specific areas of the city, 79 belonged to the first and were not subject to any residential restrictions. To oppose attempts to evade taxes and registration, the Ufficio dell’Onestà imposed increasingly strict controls and above all involved the families of prostitutes, asking them to report on their activities (Brackett 1993). This policy to control prostitution was not, however, aimed at its repression but at securing a flow of capital to the monastery of the Convertite and to the state coffers. The seventeenth-century censuses are

  Bodies as Resources 

161

evidence of its success: between 1606 and 1626, there were 571 prostitutes, 279 of whom were Florentine and 205 Tuscan; 417 of them were unmarried, 81 married and 73 widows. The figures available for the years 1627–1650 are much lower, but similar in their make-up: 111 Florentine and 53 Tuscan out of a total of 196 registered prostitutes, of which 150 were unmarried, 36 were widows and 10 married. Compared to the fifteenth century, the make-up of urban prostitution seemed to have profoundly changed, but a more likely explanation is that the more sophisticated reporting procedures no longer allowed local women to escape control by relying on their own networks of friends and relatives. Many of these women would then end up in the Convertite monastery, but, in 1648, the abbess wrote to Ferdinand II de’ Medici that many poor young women, relatives of prostitutes, were asking to be registered as such despite not having ever practised the profession for the sole purpose of obtaining the dowries provided by the monastery (Brackett 1993). Port towns have always been ideal locations for the proliferation of prostitution. The case of Seville in the sixteenth century is particularly significant, since the economic and social fabric was totally and rapidly disrupted by the role played by the city in the new Atlantic trade. While mercantile activities experienced unprecedented development, artisan ones suffered from foreign competition. This was particularly true of the silk industry, which gave work to many women, including nuns, to the extent that one of the reasons for the import ban on foreign silk, in 1621, was the realisation that many convents were no longer able to support themselves: in the mid-seventeenth century, only 60 looms were still active throughout the city, compared to 3000  in the previous century. The financial difficulties experienced by convents caused an increasing inability to pursue one of their main economic goals, namely absorbing the female population in ‘surplus’ to the marriage market and with scarce resources. On the other hand, the increase in the price of agricultural products, typical of the time, together with the development of commercial single-crop farming, such as oil and wine, made the merchants richer, but impoverished the peasants, pushing them to emigrate to the cities or to leave for the Americas. The consequences were contradictory for women: on the one hand, due to the strong male emigration that characterised the sixteenth century, the city is a prime context to observe and

162 

A. Bellavitis

study the processes bringing increased responsibility, authority and power to women. On the other hand, as was the case in all port cities, the most widely available resource to women, especially in times of crisis, was precisely prostitution. The appearance of syphilis, and particularly the actual epidemic of 1568, named San Gil from the name of the district in the outskirts where it spread, urged municipal authorities to tighten their control over the sex trade, setting up brothels in houses owned by the civil authorities or the Cathedral Chapter, given out to be managed by public officials, called padres, who in turn rented them to prostitutes. The municipal ordinance of 1621 limited the number of padres to two, forbidding them to rent beds or clothes to prostitutes and to surrender women as a pledge for unpaid debts. Medical examinations to check the women’s health would be followed by visits by preachers who tried to redeem them. Ambiguity and hypocrisy reigned supreme and the municipal authorities, under the pretext of protecting the women and their clients from syphilis, actually benefited from the exploitation of prostitution, a very profitable business in a bustling port city such as Seville (Perry 1978; Parma Cook 2012). The age of religious conflicts and of the success of the Protestant Reformation in part of Europe was a period of great change as far as prostitution is concerned. In Augsburg, at the end of the Middle Ages and in the first decades of the sixteenth century, before the Protestant Reformation imposed a new, if short-lived, moral order, the brothels paid taxes to the city council and the women working there were regularly checked over by municipal midwives, who had to certify their health and that they were over age. In Nuremberg, too, prostitution was managed by the municipal council, to the extent that we know of a deliberation ordering prostitutes to accept all customers and not just the younger and better-looking ones. In the event of a conflict between prostitutes and brothel keepers, the municipal institutions would act as intermediaries. As far as the council was concerned, there was no contradiction between the two activities, and indeed the brothel increased the honour and the religiousness of the city, as it offered unmarried and young men, and in particular ­apprentices, the opportunity of an outlet for their instincts without jeopardising the honour of young unmarried or married women. Married men, however, were not admitted and in Zurich, in the 1720s,

  Bodies as Resources 

163

those who broke this rule would be tried in a consistory, the religious court (Roper 1985). Brothels were places of leisure, where people ate, drank and danced. They were obviously based on a structural disparity between the freedom that men found there and the constraints imposed on the women held there. Keepers received a percentage of their earnings (in Ulm it was often a third), but sometimes, as in Überlingen, only the gifts left by the customers were given to the women, while all the payments went to the keepers. Subjected to extremely intense work schedules, young women had to refund every day of lost work, supplementing the money made from prostitution with other activities carried out during the day, such as spinning, and regularly found themselves in a vicious circle of debt, of which it became impossible to get out. Women were then used as exchange goods and sold from one brothel to another, to the extent that the municipal and religious institutions had to intervene to condemn and prohibit such practices. The success of the Protestant Reformation imposed a new moral order which, in many cases, was also reflected in the closure of brothels and in the prosecution of prostitutes, who found themselves practising the same profession, but in the streets and in hiding, thus losing even the small guarantees and protection that, in exchange for depriving them of their freedom, brothels had provided (Roper 1985). During the Dutch ‘golden age’, Amsterdam became one of the European capitals of prostitution, despite its Calvinist government being founded on very strict moral principles and despite the municipal government actively prosecuting prostitution. Between 1650 and 1760, in fact, the sentences for this crime made up more than 20 per cent of the total. But the development in maritime and commercial trade, and the constant influx of sailors were also contributing factors to the sex trade and, in the second half of the seventeenth century, about 1000 prostitutes and hundreds of female pimps were active in the city that, with its 200,000 inhabitants, was one of the major European capitals. Not only did the continuous transit of men who came from outside constitute fertile ground for the spread of prostitution, but, as we have seen in the case of Seville, so did the frequent absences of the local men. In the poorer neighbourhoods around the port, where the sailors came from, and where even nowadays the famous red-light district, where prostitutes advertise

164 

A. Bellavitis

themselves in shop windows is located, there lived many more women than men (the ratio was probably three women for every two men). The managers of second-hand shops and inns were mostly women, but so were the thieves, dealers in stolen goods, brothel keepers and managers of taverns of ill repute, and, following complaints from neighbours, the police would often raid the area, arresting hundreds of women. Thanks to this repressive, if not very effective, policy, very detailed judicial sources are available to researchers. Between 1650 and 1750, 8099 trials for prostitution involved 4633 prostitutes, 898 female pimps and 253 men, accused of exploiting or using prostitutes. It is therefore clear that the repression affected almost exclusively women and that men usually managed to get away with it. The few who were condemned for pimping were partners of female pimps. In the second half of the seventeenth century, 3149 women, aged between 18 and 25, were sentenced for prostitution, one in five from Amsterdam, the others immigrants from other Dutch, German or Scandinavian cities. Arrested in flagrante, almost all of them declared they were craftswomen (seamstresses, spinners, lacemakers, etc.) or street vendors and, in some cases, domestic servants. The female pimps, older, though not much, were between 35 and 40, were often married or lived with a man and, above all, had money to lend or give the girls as advance payments. The vicious circles of debt we mentioned about Seville or Augsburg existed in Amsterdam, too, where the pimps were responsible for providing the girls with garish, albeit often second-hand, clothes and accessories. Usually, they held back half of the girls’ earnings, in exchange for food, shelter, clothing, priced well above their market value (van de Pol 2011). Many Catholic states also forbade prostitution in the early modern age: this was the case in France in 1560 and in Spain in 1632. Both in Protestant and in Catholic countries, a policy was progressively pursued that linked the repression of prostitution to the moral and religious education of prostitutes and sometimes even concerned itself with providing training in a craft. In London, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an active policy of repression of prostitution was pursued, sanctioned by the Disorderly Houses Act of 1752, which encouraged and rewarded the reporting of brothels. The measures included the founding of the Magdalen Hospital, the first hospital specifically for repentant

  Bodies as Resources 

165

prostitutes, similar to the institutions that had existed in Italian cities since the Middle Ages (Cohen 1992; Lloyd 1996; Henderson 1999). Another example, in a Catholic context, is the Bon Pasteur institute in Montpellier, founded at the end of the seventeenth century as a maison de charité and progressively transformed into something closer to a maison de force, a prison. Of the 1520 women admitted at the Bon Pasteur between 1694 and 1793, we have information about 70 per cent of them: three-quarters were immigrants from the region, and two-thirds were the daughters, wives or widows of craftsmen or farmers. Some declared they had a job—domestic service or a textile craft, sewing, spinning, laundering and so on—which evidently did not allow them to make a living, and the vast majority of them were girls between the ages of 15 and 24, without a husband or a network of relations able to help them in times of need (Jones 1978). The Revolution rendered these institutions obsolete, by abolishing the rules that prohibited prostitution, without however regulating it in any way, thus putting the girls back on the streets, without any kind of repression or protection. In fact, revolutionary legislation did not regulate prostitution, despite it being the subject of great debate in revolutionary clubs. The period is characterised by a de facto tolerance and by the absence of protection or assistance for the people most exposed to the risk of having to resort to prostitution in order to support themselves. It is precisely at this time that prostitution is transformed from the marginalised, occasional, seasonal phenomenon that characterised the old regime to a profession practised by girls who were much younger and even more marginalised, destined to become the full-time femmes publiques found in the Parisian brothels of the nineteenth century (Conner 1994–1995; Gonzalez-Quijano 2015). At the end of this rapid tour of some early modern European cities, it seems difficult to conclude that, despite it being a resource, selling one’s body and sexuality was ever the choice of women free to act and love, as confirmed by the words of a famous protagonist of the time: Too unhappy and too contrary to the meaning of being human is to force one’s body to practise such servitude, that the mere thought of it is scary. To be the prey of so many, with the risk of being deprived of your clothes,

166 

A. Bellavitis

of being robbed, of being murdered, that just one day deprives you of what you acquired over a long time, with so many other dangers of injury and of contagious and frightening illnesses; to eat with someone else’s mouth, sleep with someone else’s eyes, move according to someone else’s wishes, always running in obvious ruin of your faculties and your life; what greater misery? What riches, what comforts, what pleasures can compensate for so much weight? Believe me: of all the worldly disasters this is the worst; but then, if the respect of your soul is added to the world's respect, what perdition and what certainty of damnation is this? (Rosenthal 1992: 133)

References Brackett, J. K. (1993). The Florentine Onesta and the Control of Prostitution, 1403–1680. Sixteenth Century Journal, 24(2), 273–300. Cohen, S. (1992). The Evolution of Women’s Asylums Since 1500. New  York/ Oxford: Oxford University Press. Conner, S.  P. (1994–1995). Public Virtue and Public Women: Prostitution in Revolutionary Paris, 1793–1794. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28(2), 221–240. Ferrante, L. (1996). Il valore del corpo, ovvero la gestione economica della sessualità femminile. In A. Groppi (Ed.), Il lavoro delle donne (pp. 206–228). Rome/Bari: Laterza. Gonzalez-Quijano, L. (2015). Capitale de l’amour. Filles et lieux de plaisirs à Paris au XIXe siècle. Paris: Vendémiaire. Henderson, T. (1999). Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London: Prostitution and Control in the Metropolis, 1730–1830. London/New York: Longman. Jones, C. (1978). Prostitution and the Ruling Class in Eighteenth Century Montpellier. History Workshop Journal, 6, 7–28. Lloyd, S. (1996). Pleasure’s Golden Bait’: Prostitution, Poverty and the Magdalen Hospital in Eighteenth-Century London. History Workshop Journal, 41, 50–70. Parma Cook, A. (2012). The Women of Early Modern Triana: Life, Death, and Survival Strategies in Seville’s Maritime District. In D. Catterall & J. Campbell (Eds.), Women in Port. Gendering Communities, Economics, and Social Networks in Atlantic Port Cities, 1500–1800 (pp.  41–68). Leiden/Boston: Brill.

  Bodies as Resources 

167

Perry, E. (1978). Lost Women in Early Modern Seville: The Politics of Prostitution. Feminist Studies, 4(1), 195–214. Roper, L. (1985). Discipline and Respectability: Prostitution and Reformation in Augsburg. History Workshop Journal, 19, 3–28. Rosenthal, M. F. (1992). The Honest Courtesan. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press. Scarabello, G. (2006). Meretrices. Storia della prostituzione a Venezia dal XIII al XVIII secolo. Venice: Supernova. Schiavon, A. (2014). Veronica Franco (1546–1591). Tra re, incanti e poesie. In A. Schiavon (Ed. with the collaboration of P. Benussi), I meriti delle donne. Profili di arte e storia al femminile dai documenti dell’Archivio di Stato di Venezia (secoli XV–XVIII), Catalogo della mostra, Venezia, 6 marzo-6 giugno 2014 (pp. 58–64). Trieste: EUT. Storey, T. (2008). Carnal Commerce in Counter-Reformation Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. van de Pol, L. C. (2011). The Burgher and the Whore. Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Part III Workshops and Markets

12 Learning at Home and on the Shop Floor

In past societies, apprenticeship was the most frequent means of acquiring professional skills for young people who did not receive training within their families. Working with one’s parents since childhood was probably the simplest and most frequent means of acquiring work skills and some research has suggested that apprenticeships outside the family were used, for girls, as an option to fall back on, especially when their mothers’ death interrupted the ‘normal’ process of passing knowledge and crafts on from mother to daughter. Sharing living and working spaces, in a family of craftsmen, meant, especially for girls who spent little time at school, if they attended at all, learning gestures, absorbing knowledge and techniques that would prove useful in the future. An apprentice and her family would pay the master or mistress for the instruction given and to contribute to expenses, if the contract provided for the cohabitation. Alternatively, the master, or mistress, would pay the apprentice a modest fee when the contract expired. In the first instance, emphasis was placed on the pedagogical relationship, and an investment by the family of origin was necessary; in the second, a working relationship prevailed and, on the contrary, the apprentice turned very soon into a salaried, although poorly paid, employee. Broadly speaking, the first scenario was typical in cities such as London or Paris, whereas the latter © The Author(s) 2018 A. Bellavitis, Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96541-3_12

171

172 

A. Bellavitis

was found in Italian industrial cities, such as Venice or Florence. However, even in contexts where apprentices would generally receive a salary, in the most prestigious trades, such as jewellery or pharmacy, and in the main artistic professions, families would pay the masters instead. As it was the first stage of an artisan’s career, an apprenticeship was closely linked, at least in theory, to the guilds and, for this reason, it was much more often a way of acquiring knowledge reserved for boys. The data for the early modern era that it has been possible to reconstruct speak for themselves: in the sixteenth century, in Lyon, female apprenticeship contracts accounted for 9 per cent of the total; in Paris, 14 per cent; in Geneva, in the second half of the sixteenth century, the figure was 8.76 per cent and, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, 16.6 per cent. In Florence, between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the Wool guild alone, the figure was 22 per cent, but the Florentine contracts were drawn up more as recruitment of a subordinate workforce than as work training contracts (Zemon Davis 1986; Mottu-Weber 1990; Marcello 1993; Loats 1997). In the first half of the eighteenth century, the female apprentices in the 80 London guilds made up only 1 per cent of the total and we shall see that, in the case of England, apprenticeships had specific and in some ways more complex meanings than in many other parts of Europe. The female apprentices who were not linked to the guilds, however, were much more numerous, as we shall see later (Erickson 2011). Some research has shown that apprenticeship contracts could be regularly drawn up by notaries and signed even by craftswomen who were not members of any guild and who therefore did not, at least in theory, have the title of mistresses. This is the case with the Paris seamstresses, in the seventeenth century, before the foundation of their guild, but also of Venetian tradeswomen and craftswomen who, in the sixteenth century, entered into contracts with girls and boys despite not having the title of mistresses in a guild. When they lived together with their masters, or mistresses, who provided food and lodging, care and assistance in case of illness and in some cases even clothing, the apprentices became, for a longer or shorter period of time, members of their masters’ families and, if they were orphans hired from the city hospitals, their apprenticeship contracts became de facto adoptions (Bellavitis 2008).

  Learning at Home and on the Shop Floor 

173

In Venice, at the end of the sixteenth century, the apprenticeship contracts entered into by almost all the guilds and those for domestic service signed by artisans and merchants were registered with a state magistrate: at the end of the sixteenth century, those involving girls were about 7 per cent of the total. In fact, given the intermingling of working and living spaces typical of the artisan and mercantile world, the confusion between domestic service and apprenticeship was the rule, especially in the case of girls, as we said before. In the Venetian female apprentices’ contracts we find expressions like: “to sew women’s capes and serve”, “rags collector and servant”, “to weave silk and serve”, or even babysitting activities, as in the 1576 contract of “Marieta, daughter of the deceased Baldissera from Portogruaro, cobbler”, aged 13, who “signs up to stay and work at the craft of making silk drapes” and, added in the margin, “look after lady Barbara daughter of Sygismondo son of the deceased Vicenzo Bonelli, weaver”. Even in domestic service contracts we find the same confusion, or overlapping, of tasks, expressed by similar phrases, where, however, professional work appears as secondary: “to serve and the craft of the haberdasher”. The duration of contracts was rarely set by guild rules and also depended on the age of the apprentice. It would be: for wool weaving, from two to seven years, for silk spinning from three to nine, for haberdashery from three to seven, for ribbons and handkerchiefs making from three to eight, for sewing from two to eight and the female apprentices in the silk crafts had contracts lasting between six and eight years and higher wages. In the most prestigious crafts and where the raw material was particularly valuable, such as jewellery or pharmacy, the apprentices, always boys, did not receive a salary at the end of their contracts, but paid their masters for the teaching received. This indicates that, in these cases, the pedagogical relationship prevailed over the working one and the apprentices could expect to pursue careers in these professions. In all other cases, the contracts stipulated that a salary would be paid at the end of the contract and, in the case of girls, the money earned was the basis of a dowry that would eventually be topped up by the ubiquitous Venetian charitable institutions (Bellavitis 2006a, b). In Venice, the average age to begin an apprenticeship was 12 for girls and 14 for boys, but there are contracts even for children (boys and girls) aged five or seven, which often did not include accommodation: they are

174 

A. Bellavitis

needlework or knitting (agucchia) contracts, where women were frequently mistresses as well as apprentices. Between June 1582 and September 1583, the needleworker Andriana (guchiadora), wife of baker Zuanne (forner), employed four girls and three boys, aged between six and thirteen, for periods between two and four years, with very modest but equal wages for boys and girls. The contracts, which did not provide for board or lodging, do not contain any indication of working time, except for a 13-year-old female apprentice, employed for three years, with a salary of 11 ducats and who was not required to work on Mondays. However, the meaning of an apprenticeship in this craft seems to have been quite different for boys and girls even if, at the same age, they received equal wages: sewing and knitwear seemed to be temporary solutions for boys who tended to be, more often than in other jobs, fatherless orphans, whereas they were a true ‘career’ for girls, sometimes chosen for their daughters, even by fathers who practised the same profession (Bellavitis 2006a, b). From the end of the sixteenth century, the increase in the production of knitted stockings in the cities of northern Italy resulted in an increase in child labour in homes and workshops run by mistresses. The differences between an apprenticeship in a trade, the learning of a set of behavioural rules and the exploitation of child labour could become blurred, and the reduction in the age of the boys working in these home-based workshops went hand in hand with the increase in female work. In fact, one of the biggest problems in the workshops employing minors was sexual abuse, suffered by both boys and girls. Putting the youngest in the care of women could be considered a way to at least limit that kind of violence, but not others, judging by the numerous trials for violent acts committed against young workers which involved craftswomen in various European cities (Caracausi 2014). Master craftsmen had the right and duty to correct their apprentices, even using violence, a rather widespread corrective method which could degenerate: in 1681, two murder cases were heard at London’s Old Bailey Criminal Court, involving a 12- and a 13-year-old female apprentice killed by their mistresses. Obviously, if the apprentices had families to protect them and, above all, to pay their masters adequately, it was more difficult for these things to happen (Mendelson and Crawford 1998).

  Learning at Home and on the Shop Floor 

175

In Bristol, in the sixteenth century, girls’ apprenticeship contracts amounted to only 3 per cent of the total and about two-thirds of them concerned housework and sewing (housewifery), or they were contracts where the house mistresses, usually craftsmen’s wives, would train the young girls to become good housekeepers. Between 1617 and 1628, out of 100 girls’ apprenticeship contracts, 35 were for domestic work, 50 for textile crafts and domestic service, and only 10 contracts in the textile sector did not include domestic service duties. The only female apprentice employed by a haberdasher was a nobleman’s orphaned daughter, whose mother paid £24 for her board and lodging with the haberdasher’s family and her training, an amount similar to that in boys’ contracts. In England, it was the apprentices’ families that paid the masters; for girls, the fee was only a few pounds, paid to learn crafts such as sewing, embroidery or knitting, which were taught by the master craftsmen’s wives, or, even when there were formal arrangements, backed by craft apprenticeship contracts, within a very similar relationship to that in the teaching of housewifery. During the seventeenth century, girls were excluded from formal apprenticeships, mainly as a consequence of a demographic increase that created competition between the male and female workforce and which, as often happens in these situations, was not settled in women’s favour (Krausman Ben-Amos 1991). In many early modern European cities, both in Catholic and Protestant areas, charitable institutions were founded with the aim of teaching a craft to poor and orphaned girls. From the archives of London’s Christ’s Hospital, we learn that between 1687 and 1725, 12 per cent of apprentices (121 girls and 20 boys out of a total of 1157) were employed by mistresses, half of whom were married, and in over a third of cases where the occupations of both spouses are known, practised a craft different from their husbands’. Most of them were seamstresses (Erickson 2008). In Leiden, about a quarter of those who hired orphans between 1607 and 1623 were women, a quarter of them married (van Nederveen Meerkerk 2008). In Salisbury, in the 1620s, an ambitious programme of assistance to the poor was launched, which included helping children and adults into work. Those who were too young to be placed as apprentices were put in the care of teachers, mostly women (30 out of 58), and almost all lace makers (Willen 1988). Needlecraft, from sewing to lace-making,

176 

A. Bellavitis

were considered suitable for the youngest, both boys and girls, and it is clear that these initiatives, which in very similar forms are also found in Catholic Europe, served both to care for children and teach them a craft, but also to exploit them as workforce. In eighteenth-century Spain, to meet the Court’s demand for luxury goods—textiles, lace—an ambitious government initiative set up schools-­ workshops for poor or orphaned children based on a network of mistresses and masters, in order to train manpower for its privileged factories. For example, Guadalajara’s fine clothes factory used 168 “spinning schools” located in the surrounding region, a job which was combined with home spinning networks. Schools-workshops were widespread in many Spanish cities, organised by the government, or by private and often run by women. The wages received by girls and boys depended on the level of productivity and were higher in the schools of the manufacturers who produced for the privileged government factories. In some cases, the training received in these schools enabled the girls to become teachers themselves. (López Barahona 2016). In the Roman Conservatorio delle Mendicanti, in 1659, 120 poor girls, defined as ‘spinsters’, were engaged in the production of different kinds of cloth, a wide-ranging and specialised production, which also required the work of a 100 external girls, who, in three ‘schools’, spun the warp threads. It was work aimed at supporting the live-in girls and building up their dowries, but at the same time, training them in a craft so they could become “independent women, and able to earn money to lift their homes and families out of poverty and live off their efforts so they would not end up, for their ineptitude, having to resort to infamy and sin” (Groppi 1994: 248). The teachers were craftswomen, and sometimes real entrepreneurs, such as Maria Mondelli, who in 1785 was paid 100 ecus by the Conservatorio della Divina Provvidenza in Civitavecchia, together with her husband Angelo Luci and her brother, for teaching the young orphaned girls to use a new spinning mill of French manufacture, with 16 spindles, which she owned. Between 1786 and 1788, Maria Mondelli received a regular salary of six ecus a month from the Camera Apostolica for the teaching of mechanical spinning, while some of her students were subsequently sent to do the same in other charitable institutions of the Papal State. The association between husband and wife made it possible

  Learning at Home and on the Shop Floor 

177

to receive government contracts from women’s welfare institutions, to which Angelo Luci would have no access on his own. We note, unsurprisingly, that the population records made no mention of Maria’s activities: she was registered only as a wife. In 1787, the Reverenda Camera Apostolica sent six Roman weavers to Turin, including Filippo Scalvanti and his wife Caterina, to learn how to use some new Dutch looms. A year later, they received a salary of 10 ecus a month each, and a bonus of 15 ecus for every student who could prove they had learnt to use the new mechanical loom (Groppi 2002). At the end of the seventeenth century, at the Parisian hospital of the Trinité there lived 100 boys and 30 girls, aged between 9 and 12. They had lost at least one parent, were in good health, enrolled in the register of the poor, had been born in Paris from legitimate marriages and were able to pay an admission fee of 40 livres for boys and 50 for girls. According to the rules, after their first communion, boys and girls were employed as apprentices with the craftsmen who worked within the hospital. This happened above all with the boys, whereas for the girls, whose education was the responsibility of a housekeeper, two school teachers and two seamstresses, there was no continuity, since they started to work as soon as they entered the hospital, sewing and doing upholstery work or making products sold for the benefit of the institution. While the boys were thus preparing to follow the stages of a craftsman’s career and become masters, the girls were being trained for paid work. Nothing justified the different fates of boys and girls who started from the same condition of economic, cultural and relational poverty, if not a gender bias and the need for girls to set aside a dowry for their marriage (Crowston 2005). That the ultimate purpose of a girl’s education was marriage is also shown by the rules of Turin’s Ospedale di Carità, which, in the eighteenth century, specified that girls, in addition to sewing and embroidery, had to learn how to tidy up a room, make beds, cook and make bread, basic skills of a good house mistress or, alternatively, of a good maid (Zucca Micheletto 2014). At the end of the seventeenth century, the parish priest of the church of Saint-Eustache, in the Parisian district of the Halles market, full of opportunities but also of risks, with the help of a female English upholsterer, two female linen weavers and a seamstress, founded the school of

178 

A. Bellavitis

the Filles de Sainte-Agnès, which became the most important charity school in Paris, open to girls who had finished primary school and whose families could not afford to pay for an apprenticeship. As we can read in a parish document, “it was necessary to extend the girls’ education beyond their first communion […] to provide for their subsistence, giving them the means and the opportunity to learn a craft each according to her inclination and taste, without cost to their parents”. The school of the Filles de Sainte-Agnès was a religious institution which, in 1729, included 45 nuns, 75 boarders (40 adults and 35 girls) and almost 450 “poor girls and live-out students for education and work”, called “apprentices”. The professional education given by the nuns was limited to embroidery, tapestry and lacework and was strictly linked to the external market demand. If we add the apprentices trained by institutions to those who learned their crafts from the mistresses in the Parisian women’s guilds, in particular the 400 apprentices who each year signed a three-year apprenticeship contract with the mistresses seamstresses, we can postulate that in Paris, in the eighteenth century, more than 2000 girls learned a professional craft every year, outside their families (Crowston 2005: 435). In English towns and villages, poor children’s apprenticeships and domestic service were organised by the parishes, which paid the mistresses and the masters: children started very young and girls had to continue until the age of 18, or until marriage, boys up to the age of 24. The sum paid by the parish to the masters and the mistresses varied according to age and region: at the beginning of the seventeenth century, in Bristol, it was around 30–40 shillings; at the end of the century, in Bristol, as in London, payment could be between £5 and £8. In an autobiographical account from the late seventeenth century, a woman from Malborough said that after her parents died, she and her two sisters had been sent to live with several families of craftsmen, where, according to the agreements, they had to learn, from the head of the family’s wife, embroidery, lacework and housekeeping. The sum paid by the parish for the apprenticeships of the two eldest sisters was £2, whereas for the youngest sister, aged six, the parish had to pay £5 10d, because such a young girl could not contribute to her upkeep by working. After eight years of service, at the age of 16, fearing “being left to her own devices for fear of freedom”, she found another apprenticeship for five years and later went to live with

  Learning at Home and on the Shop Floor 

179

her aunt as a maid. Education and work overlap in this, as in other cases, confirming that the line separating apprenticeship and domestic service was everything but clear (Mendelson and Crawford 1998). In European cities, apprenticeship took on very different forms. It was a complex notion, about which it is particularly difficult to generalise. The English case is, in some respects, further complicated by the fact that an apprenticeship, mixed with domestic service, was considered a means of education, and was practised, albeit in different forms, in all walks of life, as shown by the comment, at once surprised and rather critical, made by the Venetian ambassador in London in 1498: How little love the English feel is clearly demonstrated in their children, as, having fed them up to the age of seven or eight, they place them in the houses of others in servile service, forcing them there usually for seven or nine more years, both boys and girls. And these are called “apprentices”, in which time they do the humblest tasks, and very few are born so high that they are exempt from this fate. Because everyone, however rich he may be, places his children in the houses of others, just like in his house he takes in some strangers. (Firpo 1978: 20–21)

“Servile service” and “apprenticeship” should not theoretically be synonymous, but an outsider’s gaze such as that of the Venetian ambassador perceived them as such. But his outrage was also, and perhaps above all caused, by the fact that no one, “however rich”, escaped this fate. The circulation of young people as an educational means also existed in very different contexts, such as Portugal, where it was normal to send young nobles to more prestigious families, or rather, when possible, to the royal court. In English cities, apprenticeships in the craft guilds also had another very important social function, as it represented the first stage to obtain the title of freeman, which included the acquisition of political rights at the local level, which clearly creates the problem of the chance for women to be ‘freewomen’, with political rights, even if only on an urban and not a national scale. In theory, there was no legal obstacle to the access of women to apprenticeships and therefore to freedom and in Bristol, in some sixteenth-century contracts involving girls, the payment of a

180 

A. Bellavitis

registration fee to the citizens’ register was required. In London, women, like men, had to have their freedom and belong to a guild in order to practise commercial or craft activities. They could also inherit, purchase or acquire the title through marriage, but they had to have it, as men did, which gave rise to petitions and legal disputes, not always resolved in favour of the plaintiffs. Some women actually went down the apprenticeship route, like Elinor Mosley, daughter of a wealthy pharmacist from York, who, in 1718, became an apprentice with George Tyler, a member of the watchmakers’ guild, and his wife, Lucy. In the Tyler shop there were already two female apprentices and two more arrived later. In 1727, Elinor Mosley became a full member of the watchmakers’ guild, paying the usual fee of £1, and began to sign apprenticeship contracts, taking on at least four female apprentices in the following years, with contracts lasting seven years. Elinor Mosley, however, did not manufacture clocks, but was a milliner, as was Lucy Tyler, but since there was no guild for milliners, female apprentices and mistresses had to find a way to register with other guilds, generally linked to the trade in luxury goods, such as the watchmakers’, haberdashers’ or leather merchants’. At that time, the cost of an apprenticeship in London varied according to the type of craft and the relationship between master and apprentice: when contracts were entered with relatives, they did not involve any payment. The duration, set to seven years for all guilds, was quite long and it is clear that, after a period devoted to learning the craft, apprentices contributed to production. The female apprentices with the Tylers and with Mosley paid between £40 and £60, a very high price, similar to that paid by apprentices in the most prestigious crafts: merchants, pharmacists and goldsmiths. In the first half of the eighteenth century, 45 per cent of the female apprentices in the haberdashers’ guild (51 out of 114) began their training with female milliners and, out of the 27 apprentices in the grocers’ guild, 18 worked with female milliners. Not all the London female apprentices progressed in their careers up to obtaining their freedom: for example, in the case of the watchmakers’ guild, only 8 out of 38 succeeded, whereas, in the leather merchants’, 18 out of 27 did. The title of freewoman, an expression that very rarely appears in the sources, did not allow those who had it to hold offices in the guilds, nor to participate in the political life of the City

  Learning at Home and on the Shop Floor 

181

(Erickson 2011). Even in Essex and Staffordshire, girls from respectable families who were apprenticed with milliners, paying them good money, between £25 and £75, or those apprenticed with seamstresses, at the lower, but still considerable cost of about £12, were training to open a workshop of their own and to ‘have a career’ in their crafts (Simonton 1991).

References Barahona, V. L. (2016). Las trabajadoras en la sociedad madrileña del siglo XVIII. Madrid: ACCI. Bellavitis, A. (2006a). Le travail des femmes dans les contrats d’apprentissage de la Giustizia Vecchia (Venise, XVI siècle). e In I. Chabot, J. Hayez, & D. Lett (Eds.), La famille, les femmes et le quotidien (XIV–XVIII siècle) (pp. 181–195). Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Bellavitis, A. (2006b). Apprentissages masculins, apprentissages féminins à Venise au XVIe siècle. Histoire Urbaine, 15, 49–73. Bellavitis, A. (2008). Famille, genre, transmission à Venise au XVIe siècle. Rome: École Française de Rome. Caracausi, A. (2014). Beaten Children and Women’s Work in Early Modern Italy. Past and Present, 222(1), 95–128. Crowston, C. (2005). L’apprentissage hors des corporations. Les formations professionnelles alternatives à Paris sous l’Ancien Régime. Annales. Histoire, Sciences sociales, 2, 409–441. Erickson, A. M. (2008). Married Women’s Occupations in Eighteenth-Century London. Continuity and Change, 23(2), 267–307. Erickson, A.  M. (2011). Eleanor Mosley and Other Milliners in the City of London Companies, 1700–1750. History Workshop Journal, 71, 147–172. Firpo, L. (Ed.). (1978). Ambasciatori veneti in Inghilterra (pp.  3–48). Torino: Utet. Groppi, A. (1994). I conservatori della virtù. Donne recluse nella Roma dei Papi. Roma/Bari: Laterza. Groppi, A. (2002). Une ressource légale pour une pratique illégale. Les juifs et les femmes contre la corporation des tailleurs dans la Rome pontificale (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles). In R. Ago (Ed.), The value of the norm/Il valore delle norme (pp. 137–162). Rome: Biblink.

182 

A. Bellavitis

Krausman Ben-Amos, I. (1991). Women Apprentices in the Trades and Crafts of Early Modern Bristol. Continuity and Change, 6(2), 227–252. Loats, C.  L. (1997). Gender, Guilds and Work Identity: Perspectives from Sixteenth-Century Paris. French Historical Studies, 20(1), 15–30. Marcello, L. (1993). Andare a bottega. Adolescenza e apprendistato nelle arti (sec. XVI–XVII). In O. Niccoli (Ed.), Infanzie. Funzioni di un gruppo liminale dal mondo classico all’età moderna (pp. 231–251). Florence: Ponte alle Grazie. Mendelson, S., & Crawford, P. (1998). Women in Early Modern England 1550–1720. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mottu-Weber, L. (1990). L’évolution des activités professionnelles des femmes à Genève du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle. In S.  Cavaciocchi (Ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (pp. 345–357). Florence: Le Monnier. Simonton, D. (1991). Apprenticeship, Training and Gender in Eighteenth-­ Century England. In M.  Berg (Ed.), Markets and Manufacture in Early Industrial Europe (pp. 227–258). London/New York: Routledge. van Nederveen Meerkerk, E. (2008). Couples Cooperating? Dutch Textile Workers, Family Labour and the ‘Industrious Revolution’, c. 1600–1800. Continuity and Change, 23, 237–266. Willen, D. (1988). Women in the Public Sphere in Early Modern England: The Case of the Urban Working Poor. Sixteenth Century Journal, 9(4), 559–575. Zemon Davis, N. (1986). Women in the Crafts in Sixteenth-Century Lyon. In B. Hanawalt (Ed.), Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe (pp. 167–197). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Zucca Micheletto, B. (2014). Progetti migratori: lavoro e proprietà delle donne nelle migrazioni familiari dell’Italia preindustriale (Torino, XVIII secolo). Genesis, XIII(1), 31–48.

13 Women, Families, Guilds and the French Exception

The overlap, complementarity or contradiction between family roles and work roles are traits common to many, and possibly all societies. We are much more used to considering the family dimension when dealing with the work duties of women, and much less so when dealing with men’s. But it is obvious that the training received in one’s family, the opportunity to succeed one’s parents in a profession and marriage as an investment within an economic enterprise are traits common to both sexes. The different ways in which work, family and institutions interact are complex and in all ages have multiple economic and legal implications, ranging from the valuing of the working identities and professional skills of family members with lower legal standings, to the problem of recognising the sharing of living and working spaces as a way to learn the secrets of the trade. If it is true that their families, more so in the past than today, determined the destinies of both men and women, it is equally true that, in the European cities of the early modern age, the work that women did for the market was not only carried out as subordinates to their husbands or fathers, and that unmarried, married and widowed women had independent jobs that they managed in different ways, according to the historical, economic and legal contexts that they found © The Author(s) 2018 A. Bellavitis, Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96541-3_13

183

184 

A. Bellavitis

themselves in, and often in a much more autonomous way than one might think today. The wives and children of master craftsmen were a constant presence in workshops, in all European cities. Workshops and paternal trades were not always passed on to sons: in Venice, in the guild of the pork butchers, not only the sons, but also the daughters could take over the shop, but only for a limited time. The children could keep the shop, until the youngest son had reached the age of 15 and, if no one wanted to continue, the activity was to be considered ‘extinct’, whilst the daughters could carry on up to 18 years of age of the youngest but then, willingly or not, the shop was ‘extinct’, because the daughters could not register to the guild as mistresses. In 1622, the widows were authorised to continue the activity, “whether or not they have children of their husbands” (Bellavitis 2018: 189). In Rennes, daughters of merchants could also be admitted to their guild, although without access to certain leadership positions, and could pass this privilege onto their husbands. Even when family workshops were destined for sons, as more frequently happened, the intra-family transfer of craft skills to daughters made them more valuable on the marriage market (Musgrave 1997). For example, in another important city in Brittany, Nantes, in 22 out of the city’s 32 guilds, the husbands of master craftsmen’s daughters who had completed apprenticeships in the same trade paid reduced admission fees. When daughters did not have access to the guilds personally, even though they worked in the workshops with their fathers, they often could transfer some rights to their husbands, a trend that increased through the early modern age, and that can be read as symptomatic of an increase in the patriarchal hierarchy, but could also give women greater contractual power within their families. Some women certainly tried to enforce their rights to practise their professions, as shown by the law suits filed by the guilds against whoever stated, as one Demoiselle Rasaux did in 1753, to be “the daughter of a master tailor” and therefore to have the right to practise that trade, or by the Saget sisters, daughters of a hosiery weaver who, unlike the previous example, were granted the right to continue their father’s work: in a 1781-guild deliberation, we can in fact read that, as the daughters of a master craftsman, “they had always contributed to the community’s finances” and their products satisfied the requirements of the guild (Locklin 2007).

  Women, Families, Guilds and the French Exception 

185

Choosing one’s future spouse from within the same trade or from similar or complementary trades allowed for the creation of networks and alliances and, sometimes, for the setting up of family companies and even dynasties, where the skills acquired by the daughters in their families of origin would be put to good use. In the absence of sons, workshops could be left to one’s daughters, or tools to apprentices. In such cases, the latter remained under the charge of the widows and may be mentioned in their wills, or a master craftsman’s widow might end up marrying his apprentice (Cavallo 2006; Da Molin and Carboni 2009; Harding 2009). In many small and medium-sized commercial businesses, wives kept the accounts or sold goods in the shop, whilst their husbands were in charge of production. Managing the relations with their suppliers and customers and daily bookkeeping are the classic occupations for which it is difficult to find evidence in the sources, unless we have correspondence that can shed light on the roles carried out by wives, for example, when merchant husbands were absent (Maitte 2016). Sometimes, however, it was the guild statutes themselves that took into consideration these female roles, as in the case of the butchers from Nantes, by authorising the masters’ wives to trade independently, under the protection of the guild, as sellers of offal (Musgrave 1997). The 1789 census in Ravensburg shows a significant presence of widows as heads of artisan and commercial businesses where, in at least half of the cases, activities were managed together with their sons and daughters, daughters- and sons-in-law. Partnerships between family members— mostly between mothers and sons—were common in English cities: in Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield between 1760 and 1830, 6 per cent of working women in the trade directories were listed in partnerships with other family members (Barker 2006: 107). This kind of collaboration was rarely regulated by special written agreements, whereas these are found in the marriage contracts of sons and daughters, which report that the couple was expected to work in the business managed by widows. In this case, the terms of the joint management of the business and the gradual transfer of responsibilities and property to the young couple were specified. In Lyon, in the seventeenth century, in the marriage contract of her son, a Parisian merchant, to the daughter of a merchant from Lyon, Jacquette Dubois undertook to make him a partner in her commercial

186 

A. Bellavitis

activity, giving him an advance of 2000 lire on his inheritance (Martinat 2009). In Ravensburg, at the end of the eighteenth century, Anna Sabina Somin, when finalising her son’s marriage, decided that the time had come to arrange her gradual withdrawal from business. She set up a commercial partnership with the young couple, outlining in no uncertain terms the share due to each partner. In a similar way, widows’ wills specified the ways in which businesses were to be passed on, favouring the sons or daughters who had worked with them. For example, in her will Franziska Linderin, a watchmaker who had shared her home with four grown-up daughters, left to the eldest, Eleonora Linderin, who had worked with ‘indefatigable diligence’ in the business, her house and the tools of their trade, but required her to compensate her sisters in cash. Linderin was the only woman at the head of a business of this kind in the city, and the only other watchmaker to appear in the 1789 census was her brother, August Linder. The son had obviously started his own business, whereas the widow and her daughters had continued to manage the family business (Ingendahl 2009). Widows working with their own daughters were a rather common occurrence, for example, in the countryside, in winemaking and, in the city, in typically feminine activities, such as sewing. But these were often poor families, whom we find in the lists of those helped by public charity. At the end of the eighteenth century, all over Europe, a growing mistrust of families made up of widows and their daughters begins to emerge, as they were suspected of living from prostitution. It was then necessary to explain in court that the daughters did not “go into service” so as to be able to care for their elderly or sick mothers, or neighbours were asked to testify that the daughters contributed to the family budgets by embroidering or sewing, and certainly not by making a living from some “illicit trade” (Ingendahl 2009). The collaboration of wives in workshops was reflected in the rules of the crafts guilds that usually authorised widows to continue their husbands’ work. From the guild hierarchies’ points of view, the presence of widows in the guilds was a double-edged sword: on one hand, it confirmed and ratified the role of the master as pater familias, able to ensure his succession and protect his family, but, on the other hand, it gave women the opportunity to manage the affairs and assets of the business in complete autonomy, a possible outcome which it was necessary to

  Women, Families, Guilds and the French Exception 

187

control. This is why widows’ rights were rigidly fixed by the guild’s rules: often they were allowed to manage the business for a limited time only, or were not allowed to hire new apprentices. A master craftsman’s widow’s new marriage implied even greater problems and almost everywhere they were not allowed to remarrying a man from outside the guild, whereas marriage to an apprentice was usually encouraged, for example, by exemption from the payment of registration fees or from the guild’s admission tests. Widows were not always authorised to teach apprentices their trades. In Poitiers, for example, they could not do so in the surgeons’ guild, in contrast to the grocers’ guilds and generally to those related to food. In some activities, widows continued to manage the purchasing of raw materials, but they did not head workshops. In other areas, however, they took direct control of production, such as in the case of printing, one of the trades, as we shall see, where, all over Europe, widows were at the head of actual publishing companies. The final reason for entrusting the management of workshops to widows was to ensure their transition from fathers to sons and legitimate heirs, therefore guild rules did not always authorise childless widows to resume the trade, or did so only for a limited period of time. Those who wanted to continue, because they had the necessary technical knowledge and the clientele, had to face a court hearing. Many of them did so, but rarely was declaring their working identities, skills and pride in their trade the most effective defence strategy, rather than insisting on work as a vital need not to end up in penury, or even working the streets (Groppi 2002b). In Barcelona, during the mid-seventeenth-century plague epidemics, the municipal order that forbade childless widows from following their husbands’ trades was suspended. It was an emergency situation, reminiscent of the war years of the twentieth century, when women were called upon to take the men’s places in the factories for military production. Even in that instance, however, women were requested, once the emergency was over, to withdraw and make way for new craftsmen. The widows’ petitions, which, 30 years after the end of the epidemic, asked they be allowed to continue their work, insisted upon the benefits that their work had brought to the city community “at the time of contagion, when nobody could be found” (Vicente Valentin 1994). In situations of family crisis, if husbands had lost their minds or ended up in jail, were

188 

A. Bellavitis

away fighting, or had simply disappeared without a trace, in Barcelona, as in Rome or Nuremberg, the guilds authorised wives to continue their work. In Rouen, in the eighteenth century, around 10 per cent of guild members were widows, and were significantly concentrated in trades characterised as ‘male’, such as tanners (24 per cent) or plasterers (25 per cent), and with even more significant percentages in trades working with food (31 per cent of butchers and 34 per cent of cured meat producers). It is interesting to note that, according to the 1775 tax registers, widows who worked in male guilds had incomes up to 12 times higher than widows working in female-only guilds, for the most part limited to the textiles industry. In Rouen’s female guilds, even the widowers of mistresses had some, albeit very limited, rights, and in the most important one, that of female weavers and manufacturers of garments in new linen (lingères en neuf), they could continue to manage the workshops only for three months. As long as the guilds functioned as legal bodies based on the family that held the secrets of the trade, there was a place for widows. However, at the end of the century, after the reorganisation that followed the attempt to suppress the guilds in 1776, their rights were questioned again and only in 1783 did the French monarchy issue a decree which reconfirmed the ancient custom that allowed the widows of master craftsmen to be able to continue to work through their widowhood. A few years later, the French Revolution would definitively wipe out the guild system along with its privileges, guarantees and exclusions (Hafter 2003). The textile sector is traditionally dominated by women’s work, although some jobs, such as embroidering, sewing or tailoring, which nowadays seem to have always been done by women, become ‘feminised’ only in the early modern age. These were activities that women carried out for their families, and more rarely as paid work and usually in subordinate roles: sewing has not been a ‘woman’s’ job since time immemorial and, after all, even nowadays the great couturiers are more often men than women. In the second half of the seventeenth century, the conflicts between the guild of Parisian tailors and the seamstresses who worked for them resulted in a new guild, the seamstresses’. It is interesting, however, to note that, according to an ancient hierarchy, in French the tailor is the one who “cuts” the clothes (tailleur), and therefore creates them, the

  Women, Families, Guilds and the French Exception 

189

seamstress the one who “sews” them (couturière), and therefore works under direction (Coffin 1994). As has already been noted, the case of the French seamstresses poses a considerable challenge to the thesis of the decline in the legal status of the economic activities carried out by women. In 1675, two seamstresses’ guilds were established in Paris and Rouen, while in other cities  the exclusively male tailors’ guilds began to accept women: in 1750, there were mistresses in the tailors’ guilds of at least 15 French cities, from Brittany to Picardy, from Provence to Auvergne. They devoted themselves exclusively to making clothes for women and children. The creation of seamstress guilds was part of a project by Colbert, Louis XIV’s Minister, to promote the textile sector and encourage guild organisation in order to improve the collection of taxes from manufacturing production. These were not the first women’s guilds established in France, since, as has been said, exclusively female textile guilds had existed since the Middle Ages both in the capital, Paris, and in the second economic centre of the time, Rouen, but the seamstresses’ guild represented the official recognition and formalisation of an activity traditionally performed by women, not only within their families. The study of notarial deeds has shown that seamstresses entered into apprenticeship contracts, even though they did not have the official title of mistresses, long before they formed a guild. The seamstresses’ professional identity was therefore already well-defined and the passing on of technical skills already established, well beyond the level of transmission within their families. This unofficial organisation, in competition with the tailors’ guilds, was tolerated only by virtue of the lower wages received by women and due to the difficulty of controlling a workforce operating within their own homes and whose work could always be passed off as unpaid work done for the family (Crowston 2001). It is interesting, in this regard, to compare the Paris case with that of the Roman seamstresses, who, during the eighteenth century, were the objects of complaints raised by the guild of tailors, who accused them of illegally practising their craft and of competing with them, but without following guild rules. In court, the seamstresses asserted their right to sew and make clothes for their families, stating that it was absolutely not illegal work for the open market, but, on the contrary, their normal activity

190 

A. Bellavitis

as mothers within their families. Accused of keeping apprentices and workers, they replied that these were relatives who helped out so as not to remain idle, thus fully taking on the gender identity that society imposed on them, that of wives and mothers dependent on the needs of their families, but turning it into an advantage, namely the opportunity to avoid the constraints arising from guild membership. What the tailors were asking for, but did not get, was to force them to pay the guild membership fee and abide by its rules: belonging to a guild was not just a privilege and recognition of a social role, but also a burden and a limitation, also because women would not have access to the guild’s leadership positions (Groppi 2002a). Colbert’s edict of 1675 forced all ‘non-guild’ workers to join a craft guild. This was not the first attempt, but it was the most effective and, within a few years, the number of guilds in Paris doubled. The seamstresses responded quickly to the invitation, proposing their statutes, which confirms the existence of a strong professional identity as well as an organisation able to provide a rapid and effective response. In the letters sent to the king, the seamstresses declared that, were they not allowed to have their own independent organisation, they would be forced to find other, less honest, sources of income: the allusion to prostitution is clear. The Châtelet court decided that, since the authorities had not been able to control their activities up until then, it was better to authorise them to form an independent craft association, so as to make it easier to control them. In the king’s answer, the tasks of the new guild were then defined, according to precise gender distinctions: seamstresses could not employ men as waged employees and tailors could not employ women, except for the members of their own families. In addition, seamstresses had to work exclusively with women’s clothing, since “women would have been more comfortable with other women”. This may have been a way to make the tailors accept the creation of a competing guild, but it is strange that, in this way, guilds with partial production monopolies should be created, given that the exclusive right by the seamstresses’ guild to make women’s clothing stopped at the royal palace door: the court ladies’ clothes, in fact, were the tailors’ responsibility (Crowston 2001). The creation of new guilds continued in French society until the 1730s, when the trend was reversed, until it ceased—provisionally—in 1776,

  Women, Families, Guilds and the French Exception 

191

with Turgot’s reforms. Other plans to create exclusively female crafts associations in Paris did not succeed. Included with those who applied, there were women greengrocers, hairdressers, school teachers, tripe sellers, stocking darners, egg sellers, herbalists, beret-makers, which gives us an idea of the variety of women’s occupations in the French capital. Around a 1000 seamstresses joined the new guild, that is about a third of the seamstresses working in Paris at the time. The admission fee must have been too high for many of them, but many certainly chose to continue working in their family workshops, with their fathers and husbands. The King’s Council tried several times to force the tailors’ wives and daughters to join the women’s guild. This, however, meant denying the tailors one of their privileges, that is being able to make the women from their families work in their workshops. Thus, a conflict opened up with the masters who were also heads of families, as if the king wanted to disrupt the well-­ established gender roles. At the same time, the tailors continued to give work to female labourers, in addition to the women from their families, claiming that they did not have any other job opportunities and that otherwise they would be forced into prostitution. In 1678, the Paris Parliament authorised the tailors to employ one female apprentice in addition to their daughters, and gave them the right to inspect the work of the master seamstresses: their guild thus lost its independence (Crowston 2001). Where, as in the city of Caen, in Normandy, a women’s guild was not created, the seamstresses had to join the tailors’. Conflict, even in this case, broke out between women: the seamstresses were opposed to the tailors’ widows stating that, as they had not followed the period of apprenticeship that was imposed on them, they did not have the right to take over the running of heir workshops from their husbands. This tug of war lasted for about 20 years and ended, in 1744, with a sentence by the King’s Council that authorised widows, if they did not remarry, to make clothes for women and children, too, that is the garments on which the seamstresses were trying to impose their monopoly (Crowston 2001). The seamstresses were rather feisty in Paris, too, particularly when Turgot, in 1776, decreed the suppression of all guilds. One of the ­arguments put forward by the minister in favour of his initiative was that, in a situation where they were free to work, women would more easily

192 

A. Bellavitis

find paid work and ‘women’s jobs’ would ‘naturally’ be open to them, thus removing the risk of having to resort to dishonourable activities. Conversely, the Paris seamstresses reacted by addressing three ‘memos’ to the king, where they declared that the guild system gave the world of work a moral order, that the guilds represented a form of protection for women, who were by their nature weaker, and that the control imposed by the guild system on mistresses prevented the latter from leading the girls into prostitution. Without the protection of the guild, they claimed, men would steal the work from women, who instead had to be able to freely develop their skills, abilities and talents, from eloquence to scientific ability, in all professions, including law, medicine and literature. The tailors opposed Turgot’s reforms, too, but with very different arguments: they insisted that guild order reflected social order, where fathers and heads of families were like the master craftsmen, whose duty, that the authorities had to guarantee and defend, was to protect women and children (Crowston 2001). The debate on the abolition of guilds, which by then had spread throughout Europe, therefore posed much wider problems, by opposing different views of the world of work and of family roles. Masters and mistresses agreed that the crafts guilds had to be defended, even though for opposing reasons: the defence of family hierarchies on the one hand and the defence of independent areas of female power on the other. The new rules of the guilds that were reconstituted only one year after the failure of Turgot’s reform were more restrictive for women: in 1777, 15th printers’ widows addressed a petition to the king protesting against the provision stating that widows were required to pay a fee to maintain the right to exercise a mastership (Lanza 2007). In 1775, in Rouen, around 10 per cent of the masters in the city’s  guilds were women. They belonged to either women’s or mixed guilds, and had acquired their titles of mistresses by following the usual path: by doing a masterpiece at the end of an apprenticeship. Another 10 per cent approximately were widows of master craftsmen who had inherited the right to membership of a men’s guild from their husbands. Some of these, such as the wool or canvas weavers’ guild, also included the wives and daughters of craftsmen and female scrap dealers, despite not having their own guild, had the almost equivalent title of metier juré.

  Women, Families, Guilds and the French Exception 

193

Of the 112 guilds in the city, ten admitted women as mistresses and four were exclusively female. Mixed guilds included, in addition to some activities in the textile and fashion sectors, such as the manufacturer of feather decorations or the weaver of ribbons and fringes, also the manufacturer of buttons and pins and the grain sellers, whereas the exclusively female guilds included seamstresses, beret-makers, weavers and makers of linen garments (lingères en neuf) and craftswomen who specialised in the repair and re-sale of used linen garments (lingères en vieux). One of the most important women’s guild was that of the bonnetières-­ enjoliveuses, who made woollen berets and decorated hats. In 1762, it had 179 women members. A feature of this guild was the old-fashioned nature of the techniques used by its members: the beret-makers knitted by hand, whereas the members of the all-male guild of beret-makers and sellers could also make use of mechanical looms. During the eighteenth century, the female beret-makers extended their monopoly to the manufacture of cloth and fur hats, and to the creation of women’s headwear (Hafter 2007). The most important, however, was the guild of the lingères en neuf, which, in 1775, included more than 200 mistresses and was organised in much the same way as the male guilds, according to a ‘master-­journeyman-­ apprentice’ hierarchy. In contrast to the Parisian guilds, all of the guild’s administrative offices were held by women. Mistresses had to be actively engaged in trade and have a shop, and they had to be at least 20 years old or married; each mistress was allowed to have an apprentice over the age of twelve for three years. To become mistresses, apprentices had to be able to make six different kinds of products, assessed by the guild’s hierarchies, and pay a total of 43 lire and 5 soldi as a registration fee. Conversely, the daughters of mistresses did not have to undertake any apprenticeships, but they simply had to show their mothers’ licences and pay lower registration fees. The four female guild inspectors were elected at a meeting of mistresses held in the textiles market hall (Halle aux toiles), and were charged with inspecting the workshops to ensure that the work was carried out according to the guild’s statutes and regulations. To be able to sell their wares at the Halle, craftswomen had to have an ‘open workshop’, that is produce the goods they were selling. The mistresses’ lingères could sell and produce all linen products, in all colours, and decorate them with

194 

A. Bellavitis

linen threads. In the early modern age, they also obtained a monopoly in the manufacture of damask linen fabrics and cotton tablecloths, as well as the right to dye the fabrics they produced. When, in the eighteenth century, cotton became more popular and widely available, they also obtained the right to weave and dye it mechanically. Active in both wholesale and retail, in the middle of the seventeenth century the lingères en neuf clashed with the male linen weavers. The conflict lasted for about 20 years, until 1664, when the Rouen Parliament granted the lingères a monopoly over the wholesale and retail trade of cotton items of all sizes, colours and shapes, both locally produced and imported. These new commercial privileges were added to those obtained a century earlier when the lingères had been granted the right to control, in collaboration with the royal administration, the arrival of raw materials, that is the linen, from the countryside to the city market. Only women were allowed to trade in linen garments and only the daughters of mistresses could benefit from it. Neither their sons nor their husbands were allowed to do so. The court explicitly stated that mistresses’ husbands were neither allowed to buy linen garments from the city nor from the rural markets. Furthermore, mistresses’ widowers were subject to more restrictive rules than those generally regulating the rights of master craftsmen’s widows in male guilds and they were allowed to continue their wives’ crafts for only three months after their death. Conversely, linen weavers’ widows were allowed to continue working with three looms, if they employed labourers. It is clear, however, that the lingères continued to maintain business relations with unauthorised merchants and that their husbands were involved in these deals. Judging by a chapter in the statutes of the Parisian lingères that forbade their husbands to entertain friendly relations with the rural linen merchants, stating that they were not allowed to go to taverns to drink and eat with them, things were not so different elsewhere, either (Hafter 2007). During the eighteenth century, various factors contributed to changing the picture. The development in the countryside around Rouen of the protoindustrial production of cotton fabrics and the collapse in demand from Spain, following Charles III’s decision to limit French imports in an attempt to help local manufacturing, caused problems for the luxury craft production in which many women, above all the lingères and the

  Women, Families, Guilds and the French Exception 

195

bonnetières-enjoliveuses, were employed. Simultaneously, the reforms of the 1770s, the crisis and the reorganisation of the French guild system, translated into the abolition of some guilds and in the merging of others. The lingères en neuf managed to organise an effective campaign: in the days following the 1778 edict abolishing the guilds, they sent several ‘petitions’ to request they be allowed to continue to exist as a female guild. The guild of the lingères en vieux, on the other hand, which was far less important and in 1776 only had 40 members, despite the protests from both sides, was merged with that of the second-hand clothes merchants, thus becoming a mixed guild. With the sole exception of the lingères en neuf, all guilds were now mixed, but under the new arrangement, women were denied the right to serve as guild officers and to vote at general meetings (Hafter 2007).

References Barker, H. (2006). The Business of Women. Female Enterprise and Urban Development in Northern England, 1760–1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bellavitis, A. (2018). Lavoro in famiglia, lavoro non remunerato. In R.  Ago (Ed.), Storia del lavoro in Italia. L’età moderna (pp.  175–198). Rome: Castelvecchi. Cavallo, S. (2006). Métiers apparentés. Barbiers-chirurgiens et artisans du corps à Turin (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle). Histoire Urbaine, 15, 27–48. Coffin, J.  C. (1994). Gender and the Guild Order: The Garment Trades in Eighteenth-Century Paris. The Journal of Economic History, 54(4), 768–793. Crowston, C. (2001). Fabricating Women. The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675–1791. Durham: Duke University Press. Da Molin, G., & Carboni, A. (2009). Gli artigiani nel Mezzogiorno d’Italia nel XVIII secolo: modelli differenziali della famiglia, del matrimonio e del controllo degli assetti produttivi. In S. Cavaciocchi (Ed.), La famiglia nell’economia europea, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studio della Fondazione Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (pp. 305–325). Florence: Firenze University Press. Groppi, A. (2002a). A Matter of Fact Rather Than Principle: Women, Work and Property in Papal Rome (Eighteenth-Nineteenth Centuries). Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 7(1), 37–55.

196 

A. Bellavitis

Groppi, A. (2002b). Une ressource légale pour une pratique illégale. Les juifs et les femmes contre la corporation des tailleurs dans la Rome pontificale (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles). In R. Ago (Ed.), The value of the norm/Il valore delle norme (pp. 137–162). Rome: Biblink. Hafter, D. (2003). Les veuves dans les corporations de Rouen sous l’Ancien Régime. In N. Pellegrin & C. H. Winn (Eds.), Veufs, veuves et veuvage dans la France d’Ancien Régime, Actes du Colloque de Poitiers, 11–12 juin 1998 (pp. 121–133). Paris: Honoré Champion. Hafter, D. (2007). Stratégies pour un emploi: travail féminin et corporations à Rouen et à Lyon, 1650–1791. Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 54(1), 98–115. Harding, V. (2009). Sons, Apprentices and Successors: The Transmission of Skills and Work Opportunities in Late Medieval and Early Modern London. In E. Finn-Einar & K. Szende (Eds.), Generations in Towns. Succession and Success in Pre-industrial Societies (pp.  153–168). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Ingendahl, G. (2009). Widows as Successors in Workshop, Office and House: A Study of Early Modern Ravensburg. In E. Finn-Einar & K. Szende (Eds.), Generations in Towns. Succession and Success in Pre-industrial Societies (pp. 76–99). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Lanza, J. M. (2007). From Wives to Widows in Early Modern Paris. Aldershot: Ashgate. Locklin, N. (2007). Women’s Work and Identity in Eighteen-Century Brittany. Aldershot/Burlington: Ashgate. Maitte, C. (2016). Le travail invisible dans les familles artisanales (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles). MEFRIM 1. https://me-frim.revues.org/2366 Martinat, M. (2009). Conversions religieuses et mobilité sociale. Quelques cas entre Genève et Lyon au XVIIe siècle. In A. Bellavitis, L. Croq, & M. Martinat (Eds.), Mobilité et transmission dans les sociétés de l’Europe moderne (pp. 139–158). Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Musgrave, E. (1997). Women and the Craft Guilds in Eighteenth-Century Nantes. In G. Crossick (Ed.), The Artisan and the European Town, 1500–1900 (pp. 151–171). Aldershot/Burlington/Singapore/Sidney: Ashgate. Vicente Valentín, M. (1994). Mujeres artesanas en la Barcelona moderna. In I. Pérez Molina (Ed.), Las mujeres en el Antiguo Régimen. Imagen y realidad (s. XVI–XVIII) (pp. 57–90). Barcelona: Icaria.

14 Silk and Skill

In the manufacture of silk, women played a very important role throughout Europe, in the Middle Ages and in the early modern period. Special skills were required for the weaving of silk drapes with gold thread, a luxury item where women held a virtual monopoly in mediaeval Europe. In Milan, in the fifteenth century, it was the only craft where a female apprenticeship existed and where women could achieve the qualification of mistresses (Zanoboni 1997). In Venice, between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, there were all-female merchant companies for the production and marketing of silk and gold fabrics (Clarke 2012). In the sixteenth century, we even find some patrician women active in the “silk trade”, such as the “magnificent madonna Adriana Morosini” who, in 1576, hired a young maid of 16, to whom she undertook to teach the silk craft (Bellavitis 2006: 190). In Cologne, at the end of the Middle Ages, there were three female guilds in the silk and silk and gold fabrics sector, but craftsmen also participated in their government, and the jury who examined the work required to be admitted to the female gold spinners’ guild was made up by two mistresses gold spinners and two master goldsmiths. Silk and gold manufacture was a monopoly of the city’s patrician families, according to © The Author(s) 2018 A. Bellavitis, Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96541-3_14

197

198 

A. Bellavitis

an interesting division of roles, whereby women managed the production and were part of the guild, whereas men were merchants and members of the municipal Council (Wensky 1982). Numerous judicial sources document the conflicts between the spinners and the gold-thread makers, accused by the craftswomen of not respecting guild privileges, by giving the gold thread to their wives to spin, taking them on as apprentices. In this case, too, it is a conflict involving gender roles, by opposing master craftsmen using the workforce represented by the women in their families and the workshops of independent, organised businesswomen. The City Council in Cologne authorised the gold-thread makers to take on their wives, and no other woman, as workers, but only after a regular period of apprenticeship. The growing competition from Augsburg’s silk and gold manufacture, a period of market contraction, but also the development in the political role of the Cologne guilds, resulted in a progressive marginalisation of women in this type of production (Howell 1986; González Athenas 2013). In early modern times, in Bologna, silk manufacturing produced mainly veils, that is, light fabrics used as headscarves, and refined silk cloth, such as brocade and damask. In 1591, 12,000 women worked at home as veil-weavers, fulfilling orders commissioned by merchants organised in the silk guild. A considerable figure, if we think that the population of the city was about 70,000 inhabitants. The production of the cloth was a monopoly of the masters in the silk weavers’ guild, who worked in the workshops with their male apprentices, but also with family members, both male and female. Another activity to which women contributed in large numbers was the repurposing of the raw or semi-­ finished materials discarded in the reeling, throwing and weaving processes. These were spun and used to make socks, aprons or weaved together with other raw materials, such as wool, cotton or hemp. If the workers themselves did not provide the female weavers with the scraps, they had to buy them from merchants and, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, about 2000 people, mostly women, were active in this sector (Guenzi 1990). The traditional putting-out system became more and more widespread during the early modern era, but was kept within the city, due to the prohibition to resort to workers from the countryside, imposed by the

  Silk and Skill 

199

guild. It was based on a different organisation of the work, in the sense that, in the sixteenth century, the female weavers worked alone at home, whereas male weavers were organised in workshops dependent on the guilds. The silk weavers’ guild, established in 1582, was originally a predominantly male guild, although women were admitted to it: in 1610, there were 21 mistresses, or 7.5 per cent of the total. But, in 1726, the percentages were reversed: 76 mistresses out of 123, or 62 per cent. Workshop manufacturing was gradually replaced by domestic weaving and, in 1796, 72 mistresses were left in work, compared to only 15 master craftsmen (Guenzi 1990). This development, which is also found in other Italian contexts, is linked to a profound transformation in the means of production, which intervened as a reaction to the crisis in the silk sector. The weaving done by women at home was less expensive, even when women were admitted to the guild with the title of mistresses, and the few remaining master craftsmen took control of the guild’s offices becoming de facto merchants-­ entrepreneurs who commissioned the work carried out at home by the mistresses. Similarly, the inclusion, in 1701, of “all men and women who make silk cloth or fabric” in the guild reflected the desire to control the female weavers of scrap materials, which competed with the silk production by the master drapers (Guenzi 1990). The female weavers were paid by the piece, with a systematic use of advance payments on future work. Each type of work had its own difficulties: the girls “were driven mad” trying to keep the warp in order by a thread which frequently broke as it was “too thin” and the women “at almost every spool they throw, they have to replace the many broken threads in the warp, because silk cannot withstand the hit necessary to weave”, as reported in contemporary sources. Despite appearances, the title of mistresses was then only a partial reflection of the female home weavers’ social promotion (Giusberti 1989: 144). In Venice, during the early modern age, the winding, doubling, warping and spinning of precious metals for the manufacture of silk and gold fabrics were mostly done by women, who represented a flexible and low-­ cost workforce. The plentiful documentation of the Silk Guild has made a detailed reconstruction of the identities and the relationships of 900 ‘winding mistresses’ between approximately 1470 and 1570 possible. The

200 

A. Bellavitis

status of 28 per cent of them is not known; 17 per cent were widows and the remaining were married or unmarried women, some of which are identified by another occupation, probably their husbands’. In a few cases, they were wives or daughters of weavers, spinners, dyers or haberdashers, or women coming from families working in the silk sector, as women usually worked in their family workshops, especially at the preparation of the thread, and therefore were not entered in the lists of independent winding mistresses. Since the fifteenth century, weavers had been allowed to work independently “on their own looms only; they can not have any help to prepare, weave or work on them from any person except the weaver himself and his wife, or his sons and daughters”. In 1554, the authorisation to work at home was extended to two looms per weaver (Molà 2000). The winding mistresses lived in all the parishes of the city and often in houses shared by several people or families, sometimes with no kinship connection: it was a strategy to share the rent costs. The cohabitation of different generations made it easier for the old to pass their skills and techniques onto the young, but it also caused power struggles and tensions, which sometimes resulted in conflicts that ended up in court. The mistresses who enjoyed a good reputation with silk merchants and master craftsmen would often ask them to deliver quantities of silk exceeding their own work capacity, reallocating some to other women looking for work, but, given the value of the raw material, fraud was a frequent problem, which the corporate hierarchies tried hard to resolve. The silk thread stolen from the silk merchants was used to produce a wide range of light fabrics, which competed with the authorised production, also monopolised by women, of veils and other types of small-size fabrics manufactured by mixing the scraps with silk thread. These were cheap products, whose manufacture was controlled by mercers; they would give the work to female weavers working at home, with the help of their daughters or other family members, and paid on a piecework basis and sometimes even in kind. However, there were also many female independent weavers, who bought their yarns from the mercers or from the winding mistresses who had taken them from the silk merchants, and then sold the finished product in the weekly markets or to the mercers themselves (Molà 2000).

  Silk and Skill 

201

The Venetian government intervened several times to protect women’s activities in the silk sector, for example in 1534 and 1535, by prohibiting the import of silk yarns from abroad, in order to protect the winding mistresses’ work. It also intervened by refusing to introduce the mechanisation of spinning, such as that “new device of beautiful invention”, built “to spin every type of fabric and together at the same time, that is linen, hemp, silk […], cotton and other similar materials”, proposed in 1570 to the Venetian government by a French noblewoman. The Provveditori di Comun replied that “it would cause damage to the poor, because this device would remove the way for the poor women spinners to earn a living, and for other groups of poor women to practise the crafts mentioned above, as well as winding, doubling and spinning silk, by which they make their living” (Molà 2000: 443). The expansion of female weaving was recorded in many Italian cities, especially from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. It was a promotion compared to the silk manufacturing activities where women were traditionally employed. In the eighteenth century, the weavers from Gorizia opposed the admission of women because they had not followed regular apprenticeships, and above all because they would have accepted lower wages. On the contrary, they could only be employed in the most ordinary jobs in the craft – such as winding, doubling, throwing silk – where more patience, more precision and less pay are sought, as it would be difficult to employ men for such jobs […]. If women had the freedom to work at the looms, each would abandon the other more tedious and less lucrative jobs to stick to the easiest and most advantageous one. (Poni 1996: 275)

In the case of Venice, the increase in the number of women employed as weavers occurred in an industry requiring high levels of professional skill. In a context of increased international competition, in particular following the development of silk production in Lyon, in fact, the Venetian silk manufacture insisted on quality output and the Venetian female weavers, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were not relegated to the production of the cheap fabrics, but were also employed for the most demanding and fashionable ones. The authorisation to the

202 

A. Bellavitis

women from the weavers’ families to work on the loom was progressively extended, in practice if not by law, to “women from the craft” whose relationship with weavers was lost in the mists of time, and who therefore would not be working in a family workshop, but were hired by the guild masters. Instead of apprentices, hired with contracts lasting four to five years, with low wages, but with guaranteed board and lodging, the master weavers would hire girls for 20–30 days at a time, as they accepted lower wages, regardless of their level of skill. In the eighteenth century, the weekly wages of male weaving labourers were around 10–11 lire, and those of female labourers would not exceed 6–7 lire. This underpaid workforce, flexible and with no rights, as they did not belong to the guild, in practice worked illegally; nevertheless, the frequent complaints to the guild court were generally resolved with no action or with symbolic convictions. A rule from 1754 made it possible for women to gain admission to the silk weavers’ guild as mistresses. It was a matter of recognising an existing situation: out of a 1000 looms in the city, 655 were operated by women, mostly daughters and wives of masters, but also 247 female paid workers. Women could access a craft guild career, starting with an apprenticeship, but not the guild’s leadership positions. Furthermore, women weavers were not allowed to produce independently, by getting the members of their families to work for them, whereas, as we have seen, male weavers who were heads of family had been allowed to do so since the fifteenth century. Women could work but only if commissioned by merchants and, in actual fact, the main purpose of the reform was to allow merchants direct access to the female workforce without the master weavers acting as “middle men” (Della Valentina 2012a). The 1754 law had been preceded by a census, ordered by the Inquisitori alle Arti, of all the city silk-weaving workshops, to which 58 women, or 7.28 per cent of weavers at the head of a workshop had responded, claiming to own 8.58 per cent of looms, that is an average of 2.68 looms per person, slightly higher than the guild average (2.29). The majority were widows (35): some ran small workshops, sometimes with the help of labourers, but others, who headed larger workshops (the maximum allowed by law was six looms per workshop), and had not always received the necessary training from their family to be both weavers and heads of

  Silk and Skill 

203

workshops, declared that they “did not know how to work”. Other businesses were run by ‘orphaned daughters’ of weavers: demonstrating a link with their fathers’ profession, in fact, allowed them to keep their workshops, unless they married craftsmen from other guilds. These were the most frequent scenarios, foreseen by the guild statutes, but there were also cases of women, abandoned by their husbands, who had continued to run their workshops, or of women “from the craft”, that is coming from silk weavers’ families, who claimed the right to run a silk workshop, despite having married a master craftsman from another guild. The census reflected an actual state of affairs, but also showed up situations that were not entirely permitted by law, in the hope of bringing them back to legality. Overall, in 1754, there were 35 mistresses who employed subordinates; the people employed by them were 81 (9.19 per cent of the total employed in weavers’ workshops), including children and relatives. The high number of family members among the employees (37 out of 81) reflects a widespread situation in the silk guild, where family members played a fundamental role in the economy of the workshop. However, analysing the workforce employed in the mistresses’ workshops in detail, we notice some distinctive features: daughters were employed in their mothers’ workshops more frequently than sons and the majority of the other family members employed were women, while the labourers hired outside the family were predominantly men (Della Valentina 2012b). In 1766, mistresses represented 10 per cent of the total number of masters, but they only owned 9 per cent of the looms, a figure compensated by the fact that 12 per cent of the merchants’ commissions went to the female weavers’ workshops, which charged lower prices. Some of the mistresses were very poor, lived alone and had a single loom “in their bedroom”, but there were also some who ran workshops with four or six looms and some of them, just like their more affluent male counterparts, devoted themselves exclusively to managing the workshop, taking care of the business side of things, supervising the work, in practice without doing any manual work. The admission of women to the silk guild was, in the case of Venice, a government initiative opposed by the master craftsmen, and aimed at reducing production costs and promoting merchant-­entrepreneurs. In fact, the master weavers opposed any request from the mistresses, interpreting the guild rules rigorously, whereas the

204 

A. Bellavitis

guild executive bodies had often distinguished themselves for their ability to interpret the rules with flexibility, to help their members (Della Valentina 2012b). In Lyon, too, since the sixteenth century, women had played a very important role in the manufacture of silk, one of the city’s most important industries. The seventeenth-century statutes of the Grande Fabrique, or the “community of master merchants and master weavers of gold, silver and silk fabrics”, authorised the workers’ wives to own a loom so as to be able to contribute to the family output. The 1686 statutes allowed two looms per workshop, one for the husband and one for the wife, who was not therefore an assistant, relegated to the humblest functions, but contributed to the most prestigious stage of silk processing, that is the weaving, which required a long apprenticeship. Weavers’ wives and daughters could also work outside the family workshop, but the privilege of being allowed to contribute to the weaving was granted exclusively to women from masters’ families. In the eighteenth century, the Grande Fabrique employed about 35,000 workers, who manufactured various types of silk fabrics, and 4000 wives and daughters of masters, but also about 19,000 ‘unskilled’ female workers, including many girls, underpaid and exploited. Out of these, the girls who prepared the sequence of threads and then moved the loom ropes so as to create the brocade design received the highest wages. They were paid by piecework, and could earn about 12 livres per week. It was also a strenuous activity, generally carried out by young girls from the age of ten. The master weavers had to offer them annual contracts and pay for their board and lodging, even when there was no work, which caused constant protests from the master weavers. They were mostly immigrant girls from the surrounding countryside and mountains who, when they wanted to make their case heard, used to return en masse to their home villages, forcing the weavers to go and fetch them back, accepting their demands (Hafter 2007). The black market thrived in Lyon too: the female spinners would hold back part of the raw silk received from the masters, wetting or greasing the yarn they returned in order to achieve the same weight as the raw material they had been given. The stolen silk was then worked by the spinners themselves at home: they thus turned into mistresses running completely illegal workshops. The haberdashers tried to stop these

  Silk and Skill 

205

­ ractices by forbidding female workers to accept orders exceeding their p individual capacity, and by imposing a fine of 25 livres. Similar strategies and behaviour were frequently reported by other guilds which used silk, such as the hatters or the button-makers: in the case of the button-makers, however, with an interesting outcome, in that it prompted the guild to accept women as mistresses, rather than only as labourers, evidently deeming open and legal competition preferable to the hidden and uncontrollable version (Hafter 2007). In the silk industry in Barcelona, too, the issue of illegal female labour was for a long time at the heart of conflicts that involved the silk weavers’ guild and the city government. The problem was that the women’s production, outside of the guild structure, was in competition with the weavers’ workshops. The municipal government, however, in addition to having the moral duty to allow the ‘poor women’ to support themselves, also received substantial tax revenue from their work, since the silk industry was booming in the seventeenth century. In 1636, the Consell de Cent issued an edict allowing women to make and sell taffeta and other silk fabrics that until then had been a guild monopoly. The guilds producing silk fabrics and velvets opposed the rule for years, accusing the women of making poor-quality products that they sold at excessively low prices. They asked the city authorities to limit the authorisation to women who had no other means to support themselves, claiming that they should “be content with working the silk with their hands and nothing more”, as they had always done, rather than selling it and even daring to hire labourers and apprentices. Finally, in 1685, the silk guilds accepted the 1636 ruling but conflicts did not cease. In 1686, a group of female silk workers asked for permission to sell the fabrics they made on their doorsteps. The Council authorised them to sell in the public square, at the entrance of their homes, but not on their doorsteps or in the porches of their homes. The Council had probably issued the 1636 edict to oppose guild monopoly and to implement a partial liberalisation of labour in certain strategic sectors, but the official reason, and the only one that could be accepted by the members of the guilds, was the poverty of the women workers, a stark reality in seventeenth-century Barcelona, where many women were heads of families with very limited resources. The liberalisation of labour was achieved during the eighteenth century, in

206 

A. Bellavitis

Catalonia as in the rest of Europe, even if with different timescales. In the context of the Barcelona textile sector, the outcome was a gradual segregation of women workers in poorly specialised activities dependent on the various stages of the manufacturing process (Vicente Valentin 1996). The presence of women in silk manufacturing is a widespread and constant phenomenon, but the ‘promotion’ of women’s work, during the early modern age and particularly in the eighteenth century, is often linked to the merchants’ desire to lower production costs, in opposition to the master craftsmen who wanted to keep the prices of finished products high. The outcome of this development, facilitated in many cases by the presence of merchants at the highest levels of city government, is, however, the actual recognition of the high level of professionalism of women’s work in the silk sector. However, the mechanisation in many stages of silk processing was increasingly upsetting the organisation of work carried out at home, in many cases pushing silk manufacturing outside the cities. In the silk mill ‘Bolognese’, with hydraulic wheel and winder, built at the end of the seventeenth century near Padua, women workers were hired every year, for the summer season, to throw the silk. They received board and lodging and, at the end of the season, wages and a tip before being taken back to their home villages (Caracausi 2014). The water-powered throwing mill, introduced in Pescia, in Tuscany, in the sixteenth century, employed at the end of the eighteenth century 80 men and 150 women. The ‘machine’ to reel introduced in Florence in the 1770s was described in 1788 in a petition addressed by two female master reelers to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, as a very serious threat to women’s work. “For some time”, they wrote, “the silk merchants of this Duchy have set up some machines which are used to reel the said silk, and need few people to function; these machines are the reason why the petitioners have been without any work whatsoever for many months”. They could not give any work to the female workers who knocked on their doors, either “so they are continuously forced to watch the above-mentioned women leave their homes with tears in their eyes, shouting, and screaming that they do not know how to eke out a living, together with their wretched families” (Malanima 1982).

  Silk and Skill 

207

References Bellavitis, A. (2006). Le travail des femmes dans les contrats d’apprentissage de la Giustizia Vecchia (Venise, XVIe siècle). In I. Chabot, J. Hayez, & D. Lett (Eds.), La famille, les femmes et le quotidien (XIVe–XVIIIe siècle) (pp. 181–195). Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Caracausi, A. (2014). La lutte pour le temps. Réglementation du travail et formes de la négociation dans les manufactures textiles de l’Italie moderne. In C. Maitte & D. Terrier (Eds.), Les temps du travail. Normes, pratiques, évolutions (XIVe– XIXe siècle) (pp. 395–414). Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Clarke, P. (2012). Le ‘mercantesse’ di Venezia nei secoli XIV e XV. Archivio Veneto, 3, 67–84. Della Valentina, M. (2012a). Il setificio salvato dalle donne: le tessitrici veneziane nel Settecento. In A. Bellavitis, N. M. Filippini, & T. Plebani (Eds.), Spazi, poteri, diritti delle donne a Venezia in età moderna (pp.  321–335). Verona: QuiEdit. Della Valentina, M. (2012b). ‘Parone’. Donne alla guida di una bottega artigiana a Venezia nel ’700. Archivio Veneto, 3, 145–159. González Athenas, M. (2013). Legal Regulation in Eighteenth-Century Cologne. The Agency of Female Artisans. In D. Simonton & A. Montenach (Eds.), Female Agency in the Urban Economy. Gender in European Towns, 1640–1830 (pp. 151–168). New York/London: Routledge. Giusberti, F. (1989). Impresa e avventura. L’industria del velo di seta a Bologna nel XVIII secolo. Milan: Franco Angeli. Guenzi, A. (1990). La tessitura femminile tra città e campagna. Bologna, secoli XVII–XVIII.  In S.  Cavaciocchi (Ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII– XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (pp. 247–259). Florence: Le Monnier. Hafter, D. (2007). Stratégies pour un emploi: travail féminin et corporations à Rouen et à Lyon, 1650–1791. Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 54(1), 98–115. Howell, M.  C. (1986). Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Malanima, P. (1982). La decadenza di un’economia cittadina. L’industria di Firenze nei secoli XVI–XVIII. Bologna: il Mulino. Molà, L. (2000). Le donne nell’industria serica veneziana del Rinascimento. In L. Molà, R. C. Mueller, & C. Zanier (Eds.), La seta in Italia dal Medioevo al Seicento. Dal baco al drappo (pp. 423–459). Venice: Marsilio.

208 

A. Bellavitis

Poni, C. (1996). Tecnologie, organizzazione produttiva e divisione sessuale del lavoro: il caso dei mulini da seta. In A. Groppi (Ed.), Il lavoro delle donne (pp. 269–296). Rome/Bari: Laterza. Vicente Valentín, M. (1996). Images and Realities of Work: Women and Guilds in Early Modern Barcelona. In M.  S. Sánchez & A.  Saint Saëns (Eds.), Spanish Women in the Golden Age (pp.  127–139). Westport/London: Greenwood Press. Wensky, M. (1982). Women’s Guilds in Cologne in the Late Middle Ages. The Journal of European Economic History, 11(3), 631–650. Zanoboni, M. P. (1997). Produzioni, commerci, lavoro femminile nella Milano del XV secolo. Milan: Cuem.

15 Printed Tracks

Printing was a very special craft activity, where in early modern times women played an important role. Two of the first known cases of women active in this sector were Estellina Conat, wife of printer Abraham Conat from Mantua, who in 1476–1477 participated in the edition of a book in Hebrew, and Anna Rugerïn from Augsburg, the first woman whose name appeared in the colophon of two books published in 1484. The most important difference between publishing and any other craft activity obviously lies in the level of education necessary to carry it out, and many daughters of printers received a very good education. Christophe Plantin, the famous publisher in Antwerp, taught his five daughters to read from the age of four or five, and the first four worked in the workshop with him as proofreaders but when someone asked him why his eldest daughter, Magdalene, could read the multilingual version of the Bible, in Hebrew, Chaldean, Syrian, Greek and Latin, Plantin replied that, even if she could read, she did not understand its content. Printers’ wives had to have extensive education too: Perette Bade, eldest daughter of Parisian humanist and publisher Josse Bade and wife of publisher Robert I Estienne, wanted everyone in her family to speak in Latin, in order to communicate more easily with the humanists who frequented the workshop. Endogamous marriages were frequent in the Renaissance © The Author(s) 2018 A. Bellavitis, Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96541-3_15

209

210 

A. Bellavitis

world of books and brides often brought as their dowries printing materials and entire collections of books to sell, in addition, of course, to a sizeable notebook with addresses and contacts useful to the business. The editorial activity taking place in convents also deserves to be mentioned: the Dominican nuns from the Convent of San Jacopo in Ripoli, near Florence, for instance, in the last decades of the fifteenth century, were involved in an activity that continued the tradition of the mediaeval copyists, and which also engaged nuns, albeit to a lesser extent than monks. On 23 February 1481, Sister Marietta was paid two “large florins” for the typesetting of the Morgante (Parker 1996). The printers’ and booksellers’ guilds did not always admit women, but some, such as the Barcelona booksellers’ guild, founded in 1553, allowed not only widows but also unmarried daughters to inherit the management of their fathers’ workshops. The guilds’ rules were very precise in this regard: if a master craftsman had left both sons and daughters, his widow was allowed to continue to manage the workshop until her son turned 18 but, if there were only daughters, a widow was allowed to stay as the head of the company until her eldest daughter married. If the latter did not marry, a widow could then continue to manage the workshop and then leave it to her daughter. It also happened that, even following a marriage, the company retained the woman’s name, and she continued to manage it with her husband. The statutes of the printers’ guild, founded in 1684, also contained similar rules, unlike all the other city guilds. The special nature of this profession is confirmed by the fact that transmission always took place within the family: the children of the Barcelona booksellers and printers did not go and work in other guilds. According to the 1716 land register, 15.7 per cent of publishing companies were run by widows (Solà 2008). Widows were usually allowed to take over their husbands’ activities and many did so, often replacing the name of the deceased with the formula “Widow … and children”. In Italy, we can mention Caterina de Silvestro, Elisabetta Rusconi, Girolama Cartolari, Clara Giolito de’ Ferrari. The colophon of the 1527 edition of the Orlando Furioso bears the words: “Printed in the noble City of Venice by Madonna Helisabetta de Rusconi”, who therefore did not define herself as the widow of Giorgio Rusconi. For some years, Caterina de Silvestro wrote: “Printed in Naples

  Printed Tracks 

211

by Madonna Catarina, who was master Sigismondo Mayr’s wife”, and then simply “In aedibus d (ominae) Catherinae de Silvestro”. Being able to leave such a trace of their activity was obviously not a common occurrence for women in the past, and this has prompted scholars to take greater interest in this specific activity, where the passing on of technical skills within the family was particularly important, also because women were often excluded from apprenticeships in this sector (Plebani 1995–1996). In printers’ workshops, the press was ‘man’s work’ and only a small percentage of women could read well enough to be able to help in the typesetting of texts and in their proofreading. Paradoxically, we are better informed about the commercial and editorial successes of the widows of printers and booksellers who took over their husbands in the running of their businesses than about the daily work of women in the printing industry, an activity that very often relied on the work of family members. Thus, for example, in his will dated 17 September 1517, Bernardino Benali, a publisher and bookseller from Venice, left 24 ducats to each of his wife’s two nieces, sisters Laura and Angela Bianzago, for their work “in painting illustrations, binding books, wetting and preparing paper for printing” (Parker 1996), whereas, in 1634, in Paris, Anne Sauvage, Mathieu I Guillemot’s widow, left her daughters, Anne and Marie, a workshop “to reward them in some way for the services and assistance they gave her at home and in the workshop after her husband’s death” (Arbour 1997: 31). It has been possible to reconstruct the careers of some women in detail, as in the case of Charlotte Guillard, active in Paris in the first half of the sixteenth century. After working with her two husbands and being widowed for the second time in 1537, Guillard pursued her career as a publisher independently, in partnership with her nephew. In 20  years of activity, she published on average eight volumes a year, for a total of 158 different titles, of various sizes and topics, from short religious booklets to the 11 volumes of the Corpus Iuris Civilis. Two-thirds of her publications were of a religious nature, including various editions of the Bible and anti-Protestant treaties, as well as Erasmus of Rotterdam’s works. In her edition of the Greek and Latin dictionary by Jacques Toussaint, Guillard included a letter to her ‘kind readers’, where she explained that

212 

A. Bellavitis

she had agreed to publish the second volume of the work after the bishop of Verona Luigi Lippomano had travelled especially to Paris to congratulate her on the first edition. Guillard published some of the first editions of the writings of the Fathers of the Church, in Greek and with a translation: overall, between 1539 and 1556, 42 different titles, which places her in second place among the Parisian publishers in Greek. Her company had four or five presses, and a staff of between 12 and 25 people, but little more is known about it. She was active in the profession for about 50 years, even if her name appears in the foreground only for 20. Her proofreader, Jean Huchier, called her “a woman of great courage”, who never published “shoddy” editions and one of her translators, the Cistercian monk Godefroi Tilmann, praised her zeal and diligence towards the Republic of Letters (Beech 1983). If widows could take over their husbands in the management of a complex activity such as publishing, it was because they had contributed to the workshop for years; for example, in the case of London, the documents from the booksellers-printers’ guild concerning conflicts at work show that husbands and wives were also business partners. According to the rules of the London guild, widows took over the running of the printing workshops but also inherited the rights deriving from guild membership (such as receiving loans or assistance), as long as they did not remarry, which many never did. In the period between 1641 and 1660, we know of 34 women active as printers and booksellers in London. Four widows were listed in the 1668 census of London printers, including Mary Simmons, widow of Matthew Simmons, who, in the 1640s, had published most of John Milton’s prose works. Simmons had taken over the printing workshop in 1654, with an under-age son, Samuel, but remained at the helm, taking on apprentices and journeymen and guiding its editorial policy, even when her son came of age and added his initials to his mother’s on the first page of their books. In 1668, Mary Simmons had two presses, where two printers, two setters and an apprentice worked (McKenzie 1992; Smith 2012). It seems that book trade was more open to women in Scotland than in England, as there was no equivalent of the Stationers Company of London to restrict entry: Agnes Campbell, the wealthiest Scottish bookseller and the larger printer in Edinburgh, was in the business for 40  years, from 1676 to 1716, after the death of her

  Printed Tracks 

213

­ usband, and became the King’s printer in Scotland and the printer to h the Church in 1712 (Simonton 2005). In sixteenth-century France, Lyon was the second publishing centre, after Paris, and here too we find women in charge of important publishing workshops. Louise Giraud, wife of the great publisher and humanist scholar Étienne Dolet, continued to run the business while her husband was in prison for heresy between 1542 and 1544, publishing at least 13 titles. Mie Roybet, widow of Barthélémy Frein, known as Rapallus, first a printer’s labourer and then a master printer, was imprisoned in 1557 for publishing works contrary to religion, together with Michel Chastillon, who ran the business with her and later became her husband. Antoinette Peronet, twice widowed (her first husband was a printer and her second one a bookseller), married a younger printer, bringing a dowry of 2080 livres in books, tools, money and annuities, partly destined for her daughters’ dowries. Widowed once again in 1565, she continued to run the publishing house for 11 years, with the help of a translator who had worked for the company before. Jeanne Giunta and Sibille de La Porte published in their own names, because they were managing their fathers’ companies. Both married, but in 1572 Jeanne Giunta obtained a separation from her husband and the restitution of her dowry, due to his poor management, whereas Sibille de La Porte, when widowed, left Calvinist Geneva, where her husband had taken refuge, to return to Catholic Lyon. They both came from families of wealthy entrepreneurs from Lyon but had neither the education nor the experience for the daily management of large companies; they left the responsibility to their children and employees, but they often intervened to influence policy in a context of great religious unrest. In a 1579 dedicatory letter, Jeanne Giunta introduced herself as devoted to the printing craft for fear of losing the honours achieved by her father and her Florentine ancestors and Sibille de La Porte participated in the drafting of the letter to her “benevolent readers” who insisted on the correctness of her 1591 edition of Aristotle (Zemon Davis 1986). Throughout France, in the first half of the seventeenth century, 208 women were active in the printing sector as publishers and booksellers: 161 published on their own account and 47 ran a printing workshop, publishing on behalf of others, or a bookshop; 43 out of the 161 publishers remained active for one or two years, printing some works, sometimes

214 

A. Bellavitis

already commissioned by their deceased husbands and then quickly selling their companies, or remarrying almost immediately and thus losing their rights to publish in their names. Of the 118 who continued their activities for a number of years, 29 published only occasionally, continuing mainly to sell books, but the other 89 continued to print and sell on a regular basis, in some cases for decades. The presence of women in publishing progressively increased: there were 44 women between 1600 and 1610, but 83 between 1641 and 1650. In the second half of the seventeenth century, more than 340 widows of printers took over their husbands’ activities. In total, we can therefore say that in seventeenth-century France about 540 women headed businesses in the publishing, printing and retailing of books and that at least 350 made a real career out of it. The custom that allowed widows to continue the activity was formalised, in the case of the Paris publishing industry, in 1618 by royal letters patent, according to which the widows of booksellers, printers and binders will be able to continue to keep their bookshops, or printing and binding workshops and to have labourers, and also allow their deceased husbands’ apprentices to complete their apprenticeships, but will not be allowed to take on any apprentices or pass on to their new husbands their licences to hold a bookshop, a printing or a bookbinding workshop, in a way which might prejudice the apprenticeships mentioned above (Arbour 1997: 29). Similar rules were in force in the other cities of the kingdom. Apprenticeships took place within the family and at least 32 out of the 208 widows who found themselves at the head of publishing enterprises were daughters of printers and booksellers. In 1649, a new rule authorised widows to take on a new apprentice when the contract of the one who had been hired by their husband had ended. During the seventeenth century, the Paris guild adopted a restrictive policy towards the admission of new masters, limiting their numbers. One of the consequences of this policy was the fact that some widows remained at the head of their workshops for longer, waiting for an opportunity for their children to be admitted to the guild as masters. In 1695, a quarter of the masters were widows (51 out of 210), and many were the heads of important ­workshops, which printed books and not just pamphlets or administrative texts (Juratic 1999).

  Printed Tracks 

215

On the whole, the French publishers published a bit of everything, albeit with some preference for religious literature, the Greek and Latin classics and the erudite works. The presence of women in the printing of religious and above all politically controversial material deserves a special mention: many of the pamphlets and leaflets against Cardinal Mazarino, the Mazarinades, came from workshops run by women. Either they were really politically engaged women or, as this was a secret and definitely marginal market, it was by definition more open to people lacking the requisite contacts to receive commissions from the court (Arbour 1997). During the eighteenth century, in the context of a booming but also increasingly competitive book market, the presence of women did not diminish despite an increasingly rigid policy by the guild hierarchies (McLeod 2015). In Rouen, where the printing industry was even more family-based than in other cities, the presence of women is proportionally higher than in Paris or Lyon, although lower in absolute terms. Between the 1650s and the 1730s, women made up between 26 per cent and 35 per cent of the members of the guild, but did not have a right to vote and could not be elected to office. In the seventeenth century, there were between 60 and 70 women booksellers in the city, around 30 of which, usually widows, headed a printing workshop. Out of 184 wives of master printers active between 1600 and 1670, 65 were daughters or widows of masters and in all families it was traditional to employ their own or other masters’ unmarried daughters. The circulation of young people between printers’ families was common practice in Rouen’s book world, but, as ever, the acceptance of women’s work in a sector not traditionally reserved for women became problematic in times of crisis, when the labour market shrank and society considered it ‘normal’ to favour male workers. In May 1656, the “journeymen printers” resorted to the law because a printer had hired a master’s widow and, in January 1659, a group of “poor daily-­wage masters” resorted to the law demanding that “the daughters of masters be allowed to work only in their fathers’ homes and not elsewhere”. The term ‘poor daily-wage masters’ is apparently contradictory, but evidently indicated those who, despite having completed their ­apprenticeships and obtained the title of masters, did not head their own workshops, but were waged employees, and is therefore a symptom of a difficult situation in

216 

A. Bellavitis

the labour market that generated tension and competition between those who were inside the guild, such as the members of a master’s family, and those who remained outside, having no family ties with master craftsmen. The court favoured the latter, since “hiring the wives and daughters of masters” was a right. In 1685, the general assembly of the community had to react to the protests of journeymen printers who complained that “many women and girls work in print shops to their detriment, forcing them to leave the city and their families”. The masters were divided on this matter. On one side there were those who appealed to tradition: “With regard to the masters’ daughters who have married, and who have always worked in this craft, both in the printing and in the bookselling sector, we must continue in the same way, because these daughters of poor masters have no other means of support”, but a group of younger masters, who identified themselves as “poor masters”, replied that it was not fair “that a man who has six children should abandon them and a girl take his place, while she could do something else” (Skora 2015: 70). Masters accepted the presence of women, but within certain limits, and widows could not continue their activity if they married a man from outside the craft. This also applied to the daughters of printers, but they could resume the activity when they were widowed. Illegitimate daughters, on the other hand, had no rights, as is gleaned from the story of Pierre Dupuis’ natural daughter who, in 1678, was refused access to the profession and, as is stated in the minutes of the guild assembly, “even if she had been legitimate, it would be even fairer and more reasonable to give work to men who had been forced to leave the city because they could not find a way to earn the bread needed to feed their wives and children”. The issue is that these women had acquired very specialised skills in their families and had every intention of enhancing them, by opposing institutions that tried to restrict them to an exclusively domestic role. The judicial sources reveal their illegal activities, such as the secret sale of books from a mercer shop or the illegal work in a printing workshop. In 1686, the community decided that the covering of books and pamphlets should be done in the workshops and not at home, precisely to stop the workers’ wives from secretly contributing to this job (Skora 2015).

  Printed Tracks 

217

At the end of the century, the monarchy tried to strengthen its control over the printing world and, under pressure from the large Parisian publishers, imposed the closure of many printing workshops in the rest of the country. Some women escaped this policy by special ‘dispensation’. Not all of them, however, were in economic difficulties and the history of women in publishing included brilliant careers in Rouen too: there is evidence of them in the community registers, as partners of other publishers-­printers and as financial backers and money lenders. Many widows proved able to relaunch an ailing company, by revamping the type of production and responding to market needs and changes. The greatest commercial success was that of Catherine Machuel, widow of Jean I Oursel, who became one of the major protagonists of the city’s publishing sector between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Oursel, in partnership with Jean-Baptiste Besongne, was a strong competitor of the famous Bibliothèque bleue, the series of popular books and almanacs with blue covers, launched by Troyes publisher Oudot, and, according to the 1701 survey of the publishing sector, hers was the company with the largest number of employees in the city. Alongside these entrepreneurial successes and examples of mere survival, we also find stories of religious dissent: women printers who went into exile to England or Holland not to deny their faith, and others who ended up in prison or on the gallows for secretly printing Protestant books, after the revocation, in 1685, of the Edict of Nantes, which in 1598 had allowed the Protestant religion in France, ending half a century of religious wars (Skora 2015).

References Arbour, R. (1997). Les femmes et les métiers du livre en France, 1600–1650. Chicago/Paris: Garamond Press-Didier Érudition. Beech, B. (1983). Charlotte Guillard: A Sixteenth-Century Business Woman. Renaissance Quarterly, 36(3), 345–367. Juratic, S. (1999). Marchandes ou savantes? Les veuves des libraires parisiens sous le règne de Louis XIV. In C. Nativel (Ed.), Femmes savantes, savoirs des femmes (pp. 59–68). Genève: Droz. McKenzie, D.  F. (1992). The Economies of Print, 1550–1750: Scales of Production and Conditions of Constraint. In S. Cavaciocchi (Ed.), Produzione e commercio della carta e del libro, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di

218 

A. Bellavitis

studio dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F.  Datini di Prato (pp. 389–425). Florence: Le Monnier. McLeod, J.  (2015). Printer Widows and the State in Eighteenth-Century France. In D. M. Hafter & N. Kushner (Eds.), Women and Work in Eighteenth-­ Century France (pp.  113–129). Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Parker, D. (1996). Women in the Book Trade in Italy, 1475–1620. Renaissance Quarterly, 49(3), 509–541. Plebani, T. (1995–1996). Ci sono le donne nella storia del libro? Miscellanea Marciana, X–XI, 299–337. Simonton, D. (2005). Claiming Their Place in the Corporate Community: Women’s Identity in Eighteenth-Century Towns. In I. Baudino, J. Carré, & C.  Révauger (Eds.), The Invisible Woman. Aspects of Women’s Work in Eighteenth-Century Britain (pp. 101–116). London/New York: Routledge. Skora, S. (2015). Héritières et pionnières: les femmes et le livre à Rouen à l’époque moderne. In A.  Bellavitis, V.  Jourdain, V.  Lemonnier-Lesage, & B. Zucca Micheletto (Eds.), «Tout ce qu’elle saura et pourra faire», Femmes, droits, travail en Normandie du Moyen Âge à la Grande Guerre (pp. 67–82). Mont Saint Aignan: Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre. Smith, H. (2012). Grossly Material Things. In Women and Book Production in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Solà, A. (2008). Impressores i llibreteres a la Barcelona dels segles XVIII i XIX. Recerques, 56, 91–129. Zemon Davis, N. (1986). Women in the Crafts in Sixteenth-Century Lyon. In B. Hanawalt (Ed.), Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe (pp. 167–197). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

16 In the Market Place

In early modern Europe, women were highly active in retail trade in all cities: they sold the produce of their own plots of land or the fish freshly caught by their husbands; they traded in used goods or as itinerant or semi-permanent traders, a vital activity in urban economies. Trade could be carried out in the street, in a workshop, on a market stall, but also from the balcony of one’s own home: in city and guild regulations there were often rules for those selling “from their windows”. In this area too, institutional obstacles could make trade difficult for women, but, at the same time, the authorities were willing to make some exceptions to the rules. Thus, in eighteenth-century Copenhagen, for example, guild bans were suspended for soldiers’ wives, who were authorised to trade in foodstuffs. This privilege, however, also shows the authorities’ awareness that a soldier’s salary was insufficient to support his family (Gold 2013). Specific spaces in the urban markets were in some cases reserved to women: in 1615, in Southampton, the bakers of the town had taken to setting up stalls in the women’s sector of the market “whereby to expulse” female traders. The jurors of the city court stood up for the women not to discourage country people from bringing their provisions

© The Author(s) 2018 A. Bellavitis, Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96541-3_16

219

220 

A. Bellavitis

to the market, because, they said, this could only “lead to shortages” (Pennington 2015: 157). On the other hand, invoking everybody’s right to survival, the authorities were also willing to turn a blind eye when women carried out activities that were on the cusp of or beyond legality, for example, if they took forbidden products to market, such as meat during Lent, when its consumption was forbidden, or sold bread on the black market in times of famine, as happened in Lyon during the harsh winter of 1709, when a sudden rise in the price of grain caused an immediate increase in black market activities (Montenach 2013). In Nuremberg, in the sixteenth century, to have a market stall, an annual rental fee had to be paid, but municipal councils might authorise women to manage stalls even without paying the full fee, so as to avoid burdening the public welfare system. On the market stalls, however, women also sold valuable goods, such as the books printed by the city’s busy printing presses, or imported products, such as Italian citrus fruits, oriental spices or Danish salted fish. The city archives document their illegal activities, such as secret price agreements, the unauthorised use of stalls or the production and sale of alcoholic beverages (Wiesner 1981). A typically female occupation was the sale of second-hand goods such as clothes, furniture, tools and so on, often linked to lending activities performed by the same women. In Jewish communities, the trade in second-hand clothes, cuts of fabric and rags was a fundamental activity, which relied on women’s continuous work to repair, modernise and transform goods. Even the lending carried out by pawn brokers in early modern Italian ghettos relied on the same kind of work, given that around 40 per cent of the goods pawned were never redeemed and therefore needed to be sold (Allegra 2007). In Nuremberg, to be allowed to sell second-hand goods, women had to have a municipal licence, show they owned properties, which were used as guarantees, and supply a declaration signed by two citizens vouching for the applicant’s honesty. In 1542, 111 women practised this occupation, both at the market and selling door to door: town rules required them not to exceed a certain profit, and during epidemics they were only allowed to sell goods which came from the city. In this instance too, it was an activity performed alongside pawnbroking, which, however, was not formally authorised by the licences granted by the authorities. The

  In the Market Place 

221

rules were very strict, and the goods for sale were subject to very frequent checks; very frequent, too, were the conflicts with the crafts guilds, when women were caught selling goods that were in fact not second-hand. However, the fundamental importance of their economic role in the lives of the lower classes was recognised, in Nuremberg as elsewhere, and the city authorities would often find in their favour and against the male members of the crafts guilds. These types of publicly recognised work requiring a municipal licence, and the sense of belonging to a group expressed by these women in their frequent petitions and protests to the city council, made them into a kind of de facto guild, not formally recognised, but equally significant from the point of view of the working identity of those who referred to it (Wiesner 1981). In the eighteenth century, we find in Toulouse an organised female trade of second-hand clothing sellers: in 1756, two-thirds of the members were married, and about one-­ seventh were widows, while in the retail trade the percentage of widows was about 10 per cent. From 1770, men also entered this organised profession that was headed by a woman (Hanne 2007). All over Europe, many male guilds authorised the wives, daughters and widows of craftsmen to deal with the supply of raw materials for the workshop and with sales, thus sanctioning the division of tasks and labour within families that existed in practice, as we have seen. In Lyon, according to the Italian traveller Sebastiano Locatelli, in the seventeenth-­ century women managed the shops and kept the accounts, whereas their husbands were their “employees”: in the absence of their husbands, it was certainly the women who ran the businesses, which could frequently be the case with butchers who often had to spend time away to restock (Montenach 2013). Selling in markets was often a family affair: in Krakow, in 1629, only 11 per cent of the 216 market stalls were run by men, around 40 per cent by married couples and the rest by women, including a significant percentage of unmarried ones (45 per cent of authorised women traders between 1570 and 1630), who sometimes co-­ managed the market stall with their mothers (Karpinski 1990). In Turin, in 1796, 94 out of the 167 traders who entered into contracts with the municipal administration to set up stalls and kiosks to sell foodstuffs in markets were women and almost all of them were single (86), although it is impossible to know whether they were unmarried or widows. Six

222 

A. Bellavitis

turned up with their husbands, one with her son and another with her female business partner (Zucca Micheletto 2015). On the other hand, in Bologna, at the end of the eighteenth century, unmarried women were practically absent from commercial activity, where, conversely, many married women and widows were employed (Palazzi 1990). The periods of rapid economic development in the cities were also the times when women’s commercial activities found more space to develop. In Krakow, in 1545, women accounted for 57 per cent of market stallholders, in 1598 for 65 per cent and in 1629 for 70 per cent. The same kind of percentages and the same tendency to growth can be found in smaller Polish cities and in Warsaw where, in 1640, there were 186 active traders, of which 83 per cent were women. We can, however, reliably postulate that a far higher number of women traders were temporarily present in the urban markets, even if the sources do not allow us to accurately quantify them. As in the rest of Europe, the presence of women was higher in certain sectors, such as the sale of foodstuffs, flowers or haberdashery, to which we can add some local idiosyncrasies: in Krakow, for example, women made up 90 per cent of the leather goods merchants. Furthermore, we should not forget that, as happens nowadays in many cities, people were accustomed to buying ready-made meals in the street: in Krakow, in the early decades of the seventeenth century, the sale of hot meals in markets was a 100 per cent women’s business. In order to have a market stall licence, it was necessary to be from that city: the women in this group belonged to a kind of petty bourgeoisie of artisans or office workers, but some of them came from the families of domestic servants and, in this case, a licence to sell was often granted as compensation for years of faithful service. Female travelling traders came from poorer families but also, in the specific case of Poland, from the ‘free men’, that is people who were not serfs. The disputes between travelling traders and market stall owners were frequent. The various categories of women traders clearly had different levels of wealth, indicated by tax bands, according to which, in 1590, in Warsaw, the richest traders had to pay 120 groszy, the poorest 60 and the ‘poor widows’ who did not have a market stall 15. The fact that the majority of the commercial activity in the city markets was run by women also meant official recognition. In fact, in Poland we find some craftswomen’s guilds in commercial activities: at the

  In the Market Place 

223

end of the fifteenth century, in Poznań, there was a guild of women market stallholders and, in the sixteenth century, in Krakow, a similar guild appeared, as well as the guilds of women market stallholders selling butter, flowers and vegetables, which had their own statutes (Karpinski 1990). Women were an important presence on Madrid’s food market too: in the seventeenth century, the retail sale of chickens was a women’s monopoly (las galineras), but in the eighteenth century, it was mostly men who managed the trade. In the fish market, there was a clear gender hierarchy, so women were sellers of less noble fish, such as cod and men sold more valuable fish. In 1714, there were 48 stalls of cod on the plaza Mayor, all run by women. The same type of hierarchy can be found in the meat market. From the end of the Middle Ages, women were the people specialised in going to slaughterhouses to buy wholesale or ‘collect’ offal from rams that were slaughtered and sold. In 1561, the Ayuntamiento (Madrid City Council), called them ‘vagrant’, but the commerce of giblets was not insignificant at all and, since the seventeenth century, we find a female guild of female sellers of tripe and giblets (gremio de mondongueras) at the city meat market (Carnicería mayor). In fact, it was a mixed organisation, including married couples, widows and single women (Lopez Barahona 2016). In the seventeenth century, English travellers in Holland spoke of highly independent women actively participating in the economy of what would later be called the ‘Dutch Golden Age’. The visibility of women was particularly significant in the trade sector, where they represented between 13 and 34 per cent of traders, depending on the city and on its size. Institutional control was tighter in Holland on commercial than on manufacturing activities. In the case of Leiden, to engage in commercial activities it was necessary, for a small fee (from two to six stuivers), to purchase a licence, granted by the city and guild authorities, and to possess the title of ‘citizen’ (poorter). Sales licences were granted for a year: for fish in November, for fruit and vegetables in February, for textile products between the end of spring and the beginning of summer and for meat between March and April. All over Europe, women were present above all in the retail sale of foodstuff. In Leiden and in Amsterdam they were the majority (more than 70 per cent) of fishmongers and sellers of

224 

A. Bellavitis

cured meats, tripe and offal. They were often fishermen’s or butchers’ wives, whereas meat could only be sold by butchers or their widows and their wives could only replace their husbands if they were ill (van der Heuvel 2007). In Leiden, in 1710, women accounted for over 60 per cent of greengrocers: they were mostly unmarried women with the title of citizens and members of the guild. However, over the century, and in the face of increasing external competition, due to the fact that the city had grown over the agricultural land closest to the city, the male members of the greengrocers’ guild attempted—without success—to exclude women. The fish trade was the most important and the best documented: in Leiden, only citizens were allowed to sell fish and, in 1671, the fishmongers’ guild was founded. Between 1600 and 1680, women represented between 59 and 78 per cent of the fishmongers and, between 1685 and 1795, applied for between 53 and 93 per cent of licences. They were women of every marital status: unmarried, married and widows, but the women married to fishermen were also active in door-to-door sales. In 1661, the municipal government received the complaints of the local fishmongers, who claimed that they could no longer make a living because of the competition from a large number of local women who sold fish on the street. Therefore, the authorities limited the quantity of fish that women from outside of the city could sell; they authorised street vending only in the mornings and only allowed one person per family to work at the fish market. From 1678 onwards, a licence was required for door-to-­ door sales too. In the case of Amsterdam, the presence of women at the fish market was even higher: in the second half of the century, they were between 68 and 88 per cent, and married women with children were often also included (van der Heuvel 2007). In Barcelona, too, the sale of fish at the market was women’s business, and there are relatively frequent cases of the inheritance of that right down the female line. We can mention the cases of Maria Auter, a fishmonger, who, in 1658, in partnership with the widow Margarida Llautart, was granted a sales licence, regularly renewed from year to year, and of Maria Cortada, the widow of a fisherman, who, in 1686, consented to her niece Maria Fabregas, also a widow, obtaining a licence to sell fish in partnership with her. Two years later, her niece was allowed to take up the position of fishmonger left vacant

  In the Market Place 

225

f­ollowing the death of another aunt, Maria Alsina Fabregas (Vicente Valentin 1994). In northern Europe, women had long played a predominant role in the production and sale of beer. In mediaeval London, the brewing of beer was a craft performed by women, but later on, changes in production techniques and government regulations made it an increasingly male trade: setting up a brewery required greater capital, making it more difficult for single women to start their own business. With the establishment of the brewers’ guild in London in 1406, a process of specialisation began that progressively excluded female labour from the trade. In 1500, 7 per cent of members were women, but over the century their presence was limited to master brewers’ widows who were forbidden to continue in the business if they remarried (Bennett 1996). However, in eighteenth-­ century English cities, many widows managed the production and sale of beer, having been authorised in their husbands’ wills, and not necessarily on the condition that they did not remarry (Ruggiu 2009). Women continued to be present in the selling of beer, despite the fact that the pub’s landlady was one of the most stigmatised and targeted figures in popular mediaeval and early modern English literature: ballads, theatre scripts and even images insisted on their dishonesty, appearance and behaviour, often likened to that of witches and prostitutes. This negative connotation was not only linked to alcohol and its effects, but also to the misogynistic reaction to the presence of women in occupations that could grant good profits and a certain independence from men: misogyny, wrote Judith Bennett when speaking of London’s women brewers, was not only a rhetorical or literary phenomenon, but “a real and horrible problem for women”. In 1540, in Chester, two of the guilds most frequently in competition with the female brewers, the chefs’ and the innkeepers’, featured a female brewer in a theatre show, sent by Jesus Christ to hell as a punishment for her dishonesty and, a year later, the mayor, claiming that female brewers were at the root of dishonest and scandalous behaviour, ruled that no woman between the ages of 14 and 40 was allowed to be a pub landlady (Bennett 1991: 167). In Holland, on the other hand, in addition to selling it, women also continued to work in the brewing of beer. In the early modern age, in Haarlem, beer brewing was generally carried out by married couples. The laws concerning inheritance following the

226 

A. Bellavitis

deaths of master brewers allowed also widowers to take over from their wives. In Haarlem, between 1518 and 1663, 18.1 per cent of master brewers (97 out of 536 in that entire period) were women. In 1738, a new article in the guild statutes established that when a female brewer married, her husband had to swear an oath to the guild and, if he refused, he would not be allowed to contribute to the brewing of beer, which his wife would continue to do on her own (van Dekken 2010). More generally, the retail sale of alcoholic beverage was an occupation often carried out by women all over Europe, and this is evidenced by the judicial sources: towards the middle of the seventeenth century, during the Thirty Years’ War, almost a 100 breweries and retailers of alcoholic drinks in Nuremberg were run by elderly women, but not all of them were regularly licensed (Wiesner 1981). The women involved in this illegal trade, often widows, justified themselves in court by insisting they were poor and it is indeed possible that the purchase of a licence to sell alcohol was too expensive (Kumin and Tlusty 2002). There were also many women who ran taverns, inns and guesthouses: in the 1733 fiscal census in Zaragoza, they made up 10 per cent of the total (Ramiro Moya 2012: 207). They were often, but not exclusively, widows; and after all, the most famous of innkeepers, Mirandolina, from the eponymous comedy by Carlo Goldoni, said: “I’ve no intention of tying the knot; I don’t need anybody; I live honestly, and enjoy my freedom. I do business with everybody, but fall in love with nobody” (Crotti 2012: 317). Goldoni’s innkeeper was an extraordinarily modern character, in the theatre as in society and, running a public place, for an unmarried woman, could present certain problems. It may also have been for this reason that some dressed as men, as evidenced by a case mentioned in the English Gentleman’s Magazine, in 1766, about a woman who, dressed as a man, had run a pub with another woman for 36 years, and had been forced to reveal her identity after her business partner died in order to collect her inheritance. The article explains that “she appeared to be a sensible and well-bred woman, though in her male character she had always affected the plain plodding alehouse keeper” (Hill 2001: 141). In 1780, the authorities of Santiago de Compostela found, in their own way, a radical solution to the problem, by forbidding unmarried women to work in taverns (Rial García 1995). In eighteenth-century Madrid,

  In the Market Place 

227

there were widows who managed “gentlemen’s inns” (posadas de caballeros), like, in 1784, doña Josefa Yasares or doña Nicolasa Herranz de la Peña, both widows of royal notaries, but, in judicial sources, also many cases of clandestine inns run by widows, who defended themselves by saying that the “guests” were non-paying relatives (López Barahona 2016: 105). In addition to the sale of foodstuff, we find many women working as haberdashers in all European cities. Dealing with a great variety of products of varying value was a characteristic of the haberdashers’ guild: from spices to silk ribbons, from buttons to home furnishings. In the Dutch city of Bois-le-duc, since 1548, all those who kept “an open workshop” or sold items from the windows of their own homes, had to register with the haberdashers’ guild. Only if they sold at the weekly markets and annual fairs were they exempted, as travelling salespeople did not have to register and could only sell at markets. Two centuries later, in 1750, registration with the haberdashers’ guild became compulsory for those who sold second-­hand clothes too. To become a member, applicants had to be citizens by birth or by purchase (the cost of citizenship was 17 florins in Bois-le-duc, 50 in Amsterdam and 48 in Nijmegen) and pay a membership fee; having done so an apprenticeship was not required. Women were accepted if they were unmarried or widows, but not if they were married, since in that case they were supposed to work in their husbands’ workshops, except in some cases, such as in Haarlem, where married women were allowed to enrol but only after paying a higher fee. The issue was the subject of debate throughout the eighteenth century and led to the approval of new rules. In 1745, women lost their right to membership of the haberdashers’ guild when they married, unless their husbands also became members. Similarly, widows lost their right to membership if they remarried craftsmen who were not members (van der Heuvel 2007). In 1520, Venice’s haberdasher’s guild authorised women who had no “kinship or agreement” with the master haberdashers to sell up to ten ducats worth of ribbons, bonnets, silk chords and ornaments fashioned from ostrich feathers on the street, but this rule was repealed just five years later by the guild’s authorities, that ruled that “each woman selling with her wares […] has to become a member of our guild and pay the

228 

A. Bellavitis

usual fee, and have to renew her membership year after year”. In sixteenth-­century rules women and ‘youngsters’ were often included in the same category and paid the same fee. For example, on 21 February 1567 reference was made to a rule approved on 9 March 1565 that “every master craftsman admitted to our guild of haberdashers has to pay more than he used to, that is 12 ducats, and youngsters and women 4 ducats” and on 31 July 1579 a new rule was approved which established that “all those who from now on will be admitted to our guild of haberdashers must pay our scrivener a fee of 4 soldi if they are admitted as master craftsmen and those who are admitted as youngsters and women must pay the normal fee of 2 soldi”.1 In 1586, the marzeri’s Guild had 31 mistresses and 366 masters and, in a list of 305 workshop ‘youngsters’, 122 were women (Mac Kenney 1987, 1997). In a list of ‘brothers’ from 1692, only two women appear in the Major Craft: “Caterina Gerardini haberdasher of trimmings and golden lace” and “Lucrecia Muccio haberdasher of  linen” and ten in the Minor Craft, five of whom are defined as “minor haberdashers” and one who “sells from home”.2 In 1704, it was precisely the competition from travelling female haberdashers, who “with the liberty typical of their gender gain access to the houses of aristocrats, private citizens and to monasteries, and when there are engagement celebrations sell their wares depriving the poor (male) haberdashers of the profit they should be making” to prompt the request, by the ‘brothers haberdashers’, to no longer admit women “as mistresses of this guild, whether they have workshops or not, whether in the major or in the minor crafts, or as members”. The women in question, who went “about the city selling ribbons in considerable quantities, narrow and wide trimmings, and even with gold in large quantity and of considerable value”, were apparently ‘brothers’ of the guild who did not abide by the order to sell only from their own workshops or market stalls. The haberdashers’ request may have been based on a pretext, but it also clearly reflects the ability of these women too “at liberty” to take advantage of every opportunity, legal and illegal, available to them (Bellavitis 2002). We mentioned the effects on work opportunities for women of the spread, during the seventeenth and the eighteenth century of a new ‘consumer culture’. This happened in big cities and especially in north-­western Europe but not exclusively: in Grenoble, the 1739 poll tax registers

  In the Market Place 

229

named 24 female mercers, but, in 1789, they were partly replaced by more specialised shopkeepers, such as milliners, jewellers, grocers, booksellers and 23 milliners (marchandes de mode), a profession that did not exist at the beginning of the century (Montenach 2015b). In the first decades of the eighteenth century 56.6 per cent of the new tea and coffee sellers in Leiden were women and, after 1750, they were 80 per cent. Only in the more traditional commerce of haberdashers, fish and offal it is possible to find the same percentage of women sellers, and they were increasingly married women (from 3 per cent in 1700–1720 to 60 per cent in 1740–1760), wives mostly of textile workers, craftsmen as well as wage labourers. Many applied for a licence to sell those colonial products some years after marriage, and had their first children (Van der Heuvel and van Nederveen Meerkerk). Many women worked in the itinerant trade, with or without the permission of urban and market authorities. In sixteenth-century London, the fishmongers’ guild tried repeatedly to forbid fishwives to sell around the city the fish they had bought from the boats at Billingsgate: they were not, or not necessarily wives of fishermen. A plan was made to limit this activity to women over 30, wives and widows of London citizens, who were forbidden to set up shops in fixed locations: they had to ‘go up and down’ the streets crying their wares. In 1596, there were 160 authorised fishwives and, in 1625, the authorised fishwives themselves were petitioning the aldermen to stop “foreign fishwives” from encroaching on the territory of the “ancient poor fishwives” (Hubbard 2012: 205). In Copenhagen, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to be allowed to sell bread on the street a written application was required, detailing, on a street plan of the city, for which streets or street corners permission was being requested. It was also necessary to prove that the bread had been purchased from bakers regularly registered with the guild, and to present a written declaration from the bakers to certify that the trader was a ‘respectable’ woman who had always bought bread from them, often with an additional written declaration from the landlord to prove the applicant’s ‘stable residence’. Between 1796 and 1816, the city government received 778 licence applications from women selling bread as itinerant traders. Many women regularly moved from one city to another to sell various goods, made by them or by somebody else. In the eighteenth

230 

A. Bellavitis

century in particular, all over Europe and following the increased mobility of people and the growing need by the State to check their identities, strict laws were imposed even on those who were forced to move because of their work. In Copenhagen, to leave the city to go and sell at the markets of the province, a special permit issued by the city authorities, allowing travel on specific dates to conduct trade, was required. Between 1778 and 1826, at least a hundred women obtained such permits to sell mostly clothing accessories (bonnets, scarves etc.), often their own products. Their marital status is not usually known. These women traders rarely appeared in tax records, since their incomes were not high enough to attract taxation (Gold 2013). Women at the market, both as buyers and sellers, were then a ubiquitous presence in early modern Europe and if some were the official suppliers of important institutions, monasteries or city councils, others, on the contrary, were black marketeers who had no licence or authorisation, against whom the city authorities and the guilds fought relentlessly (Lemire 2005; Pennington 2015). In Renaissance Italy, a precise distinction existed—or should exist, in the intentions of the city governments— between regraters (called treccole in Bologna and Florence, rivenditrici in Venice), who “retail fruit, greens, vegetables and their seeds and other things that they have bought in order to sell again” and the honourable female sellers who sold the products of their gardens and often were the wives of peasants and farmers. In sixteenth-century Florence, regraters could enter the market area (Mercato Vecchio) only near closing time, and in Venice and Bologna, they were expected to carry a wooden tablet or banner bearing a sign to indicate they were not peasant selling their products (Welch 2005). In early modern Barcelona, unlicensed saleswomen, not belonging to any guild and called regatonas, were opposed by both the city authorities, who in 1734 sought, apparently without success, to force them to join the traders’ guild, and by the licensed saleswomen who, in 1769, reacted to the imposition of a penalty for trading on the public square by denouncing the many unlicensed itinerant traders, to whom, they said, the city authorities were not paying enough attention (Vicente Valentin 1994). Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, big and small merchants alike reacted to the protectionist policies of the European govern-

  In the Market Place 

231

ments by organising the import and sale of contraband products. This is what happened in the Netherlands, Switzerland and France in the production and sale of printed cotton fabrics. Their importation into France was banned in 1686 and in 1759 so as to favour local manufacturing, but also, following the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, to hinder protestant businesses. A predominantly masculine activity when transporting prohibited goods from one country to another, smuggling became a mainly feminine activity when it came to moving around the city and selling on goods that had entered the country illegally. When they were stopped by the police, these women, who came from the poorer classes of the urban population and were not even able to write their own names, would say that they had been given some money to deliver a package whose contents were unknown to them. However, in other cases, judicial sources reveal the existence of far better organised networks, within which roving women traders, seamstresses or landladies of inns and taverns played central roles. Often, they were the wives of tailors or workers in weavers’ or dyers’ workshops, who thus profited from the activities of the workshops, or widows or unmarried women with insecure incomes who shared the same accommodation and bought pieces of smuggled cotton fabric and turned them into handkerchiefs for sale. Although activity on a small scale, it cannot be denied that this was entrepreneurial activity that could sometimes resemble small independent workshops: on 11 June 1739, in Grenoble, from the room where the widow Caillat lived, 56 wooden blocks “of various shapes and designs, for the printing of fabrics” and various lengths of cotton printed by her were confiscated; on 29 September 1752, again in Grenoble, “twenty one pieces or cuts of printed cloth, thirty eight wooden blocks engraved with various designs, twenty one brushes and three bowls containing powdered dyes” were confiscated from the widow of François Vaillet. Fraud and smuggling were only one aspect in an economy of ruses and multiple activities, where the boundaries between legal and illegal were very blurred and where secrecy, trust and solidarity amongst neighbours were essential ingredients, together with entrepreneurial acumen and the art of improvisation (Montenach 2015a: 128). Speaking of women in the marketplace we have travelled the length and breadth of Europe, from Spain to Poland, from Italy to Denmark. In

232 

A. Bellavitis

early modern Europe, retail was one of the activities most frequently carried out by women, just as women were responsible for providing the goods their families needed on a daily basis. However, this was an activity that was strictly regulated by city laws and the trade guilds. The increased consumption during the early modern age, linked to the development of production and international trade, saw women as protagonists both as producers and consumers in equal measure. In some cases, we even find women at the head of businesses involved in international trade.

Notes 1. ASVE: Arti (Venice State Archives: Guilds archives), b. 314, reg. Capitoli e parti 1508–1608, c.n.n., 28 ottobre 1525; reg. Parti 1564–1591, c. 31, 107v. 2. ASVE Arti (Venice State Archives: Guilds archives), b. 397, reg. 28.

References Allegra, L. (2007). Il lavoro delle donne nel ghetto. In M. Luzzati & C. Galasso (Eds.), Donne nella storia degli ebrei d’Italia, Atti del IX Convegno internazionale «Italia judaica», Lucca, 6–9 giugno 2005 (pp.  295–327). Florence: Giuntina. Bellavitis, A. (2002). Donne, cittadinanza e corporazioni tra Medioevo ed età moderna: ricerche in corso. In N. M. Filippini, T. Plebani, & A. Scattigno (Eds.), Corpi e storia. Donne e uomini dal mondo antico all’età contemporanea (pp. 87–104). Rome: Viella. Bennett, J. M. (1991). Misogyny, Popular Culture, and Women’s Work. History Workshop Journal, 31(1), 166–188. Bennett, J. M. (1996). Ale, Beer and Brewsters in England. Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300–1600. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crotti, I. (2012). La locandiera: una figura della realtà sociale nella rappresentazione di Goldoni. In A. Bellavitis, N. M. Filippini, & T. Plebani (Eds.), Spazi, poteri, diritti delle donne a Venezia in età moderna (pp.  311–320). Verona: QuiEdit. Gold, C. (2013). On the Streets and in the Markets. Independent Copenhagen Saleswomen. In D. Simonton & A. Montenach (Eds.), Female Agency in the

  In the Market Place 

233

Urban Economy. Gender in European Towns, 1640–1830 (pp.  35–55). New York/London: Routledge. Hanne, G. (2007). L’enregistrement des occupations à l’épreuve du genre: Toulouse, vers 1770–1821. Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 54(1), 69–97. Hill, B. (2001). Women Alone. Spinsters in England, 1660–1850. New Haven/ London: Yale University Press. Hubbard, E. (2012). City Women. Money, Sex and the Social Order in Early Modern London. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Karpinski, A. (1990). The Woman on the Market Place. The Scale of Feminization of Retail Trade in Polish Towns in the Second Half of the 16th and the 17th Century. In S. Cavaciocchi (Ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (pp. 283–292). Florence: Le Monnier. Kumin, B., & Ann Tlusty, B. (2002). The World of the Tavern. Public Houses in Early Modern Europe. Aldershot/Burlington: Ashgate. Lemire, B. (2005). Dress, the Business of Everyday Life. Gender, Practice and Social Politics in England, c. 1600–1900. Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press. López Barahona, V. (2016). Las trabajadoras en la sociedad madrileña del siglo XVIII. Madrid: ACCI. Mac Kenney, R. (1987). Tradesmen and Traders. The Worlds of the Guilds in Venice and Europe, c. 1250–c. 1650. London/Sidney: Croom Helm. Mac Kenney, R. (1997). The guilds of Venice: State and society in the longue durée. Studi veneziani, n.s., 34, 15–43. Montenach, A. (2013). Legal Trade and Black Markets. Food Trades in Lyon in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries. In D.  Simonton & A.  Montenach (Eds.), Female Agency in the Urban Economy. Gender in European Towns, 1640–1830 (pp. 17–34). New York/London: Routledge. Montenach, A. (2015a). Genre, prohibition et commerce de détail. Les femmes et la circulation des indiennes en Lyonnais et Dauphiné (1686–1759). In S. Cavaciocchi (Ed.), Il commercio al minuto. Domanda e offerta tra economia formale e informale, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studio dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (pp. 113–130). Florence: University Press. Montenach, A. (2015b). Creating a Space for Themselves on the Urban Market: Survival Strategies and Economic Opportunities for Single Women in French Provincial Towns (Seventeenth-Eighteenth Centuries). In J.  De Groot, I.  Devos, & A.  Schmidt (Eds.), Single Life and the City 1200–1900 (pp. 50–68). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

234 

A. Bellavitis

Palazzi, M. (1990). “Tessitrici, serve, treccole”. Donne, lavoro e famiglia a Bologna nel Settecento. In S. Cavaciocchi (Ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (pp. 359–376). Florence: Le Monnier. Pennington, D. (2015). Going to Market. Women, Trade and Social Relations in Early Modern English Towns, c. 1550–1650. Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate. Ramiro Moya, F. (2012). Mujeres y trabajo en la Zaragoza del siglo XVIII. Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza. Rial García, S. M. (1995). Las mujeres en la economía urbana del Antiguo Régimen: Santiago durante el siglo XVIII. A Coruña: Edicios do Castro. Ruggiu, F.-J. (2009). Les femmes des middling sorts et la transmission de l’entreprise familiale dans l’Angleterre du long XVIIIe siècle. In S. Cavaciocchi (Ed.), La famiglia nell’economia europea, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studio della Fondazione Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (pp. 721–738). Florence: Firenze University Press. van Dekken, M. (2010). Brouwen, Branden En Bedienen: Werkende Vrouwen in De Nederlandse Dranknijverheid, 1500–1800. Amsterdam: Aksant. van der Heuvel, D. (2007). Women and Entrepreneurship. Female Traders in the Northern Netherlands, 1580–1815. Amsterdam: Askant. van der Heuvel, D., & van Nederveen Meerkerk, E. Households, Work and Consumer Changes. The Case of Tea and Coffee Sellers in 18th-Century Leiden. Mems Working Papers No. 2. https://www.kent.ac.uk/mems/research/working-papers.html Vicente Valentín, M. (1994). Mujeres artesanas en la Barcelona moderna. In I. Pérez Molina (Ed.), Las mujeres en el Antiguo Régimen. Imagen y realidad (s. XVI–XVIII) (pp. 57–90). Barcelona: Icaria. Welch, E. (2005). Shopping in the Renaissance. Consumer Cultures in Italy, 1400–1600. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Wiesner, M. E. (1981). Paltry Peddlers or Essential Merchants? Women in the Distributive Trades in Early Modern Nuremberg. The Sixteenth Century Journal, XII(2), 3–13. Zucca Micheletto, B. (2015). Tra autonomia lavorativa e strategie familiari: le donne nel commercio al dettaglio a Torino in epoca moderna. In S. Cavaciocchi (Ed.), Il commercio al minuto. Domanda e offerta tra economia formale e informale, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studio dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (pp. 153–166). Florence: Firenze University Press.

17 International Traders

Thanks to guild rules which, in the early modern age, authorised widows to take over the family business; it is possible to document the activity of women who were at the head of industrial and commercial businesses in many different areas, from construction to shipping (Musgrave 1993; Mende 2009; Lis and Soly 2012). Many were entrepreneurs, investing some of their assets in maritime companies or in capital ventures. There are several examples of this, as we shall see later, in port cities such as Saint-Malo, where, in the middle of the seventeenth century, Perrine Grout, the widow of Magon de la Lande, had shares in nine companies, or Marguerite Trouin, who travelled the length and breadth of Brittany to manage her shipping business, also lived. In the middle of the eighteenth century, in the Normandy ports, more than 20 shipping and trading companies were run by widows, alone or in partnership with their sons (Beauvalet-Boutouyrie 2001: 279–280). The existence of rare and precious sources, such as correspondence and accounts books, has sometimes allowed the detailed reconstruction of the activities of these businesswomen, from fifteenth-century Catalunya right up to eighteenth-century France. Alternatively, notarial sources, carefully scrutinised by meticulous historians, have provided equally important information. © The Author(s) 2018 A. Bellavitis, Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96541-3_17

235

236 

A. Bellavitis

Caterina Llull i Sabastida, from a family of renowned merchants from Barcelona and wife of Joan Sabastida, a merchant and royal official, lived in Sicily and had four children. Widowed in 1471, she managed the family business and her family’s estate and did not remarry. Her first accounts book opens with the expenditures for her husband’s funeral. In his will, he had expressed his concern over the safeguard of her free will and wishes, but not to such an extent as to name her as his sole executor and guardian of his children. Caterina’s first action was precisely a lawsuit, which she won, against the designated guardian, a powerful businessman and royal official, but this was merely the first in a series of legal actions that she took to ensure control of her deceased husband’s assets and business. Her correspondence with her sister Johanna, who stayed in Barcelona, effectively illustrates the administrative and financial competence of both, since Johanna also ran her family business in the absence of her brothers, who often travelled on business. It is also clear that neither was an improvised businesswoman, but both had been trained by their own family, not only in financial matters, but also in the legal matters related to the merchant trade. In 1482, Caterina organised the return of her family to Barcelona, and her accounts, in the following years, are written in the Barcelona currency. Her merchant activity can essentially be summarised in the shipment of large quantities of wheat and barley from Sicily to Barcelona, whilst on the return journey the ships, which included a caravel owned by her, were loaded with Spanish products to be sold on the Sicilian market, such as fabrics from Mallorca. Furthermore, she was involved in the slave trade between North Africa and Sicily and in lending activities. In this area too, Caterina shows a thorough knowledge of the written documents—bills of exchange, insurance and rental contracts—that allowed her to do deals for thousands of once, the Sicilian currency of the time, whilst handling very few of them, as was customary at the time (Colesanti 2010). At the end of the fifteenth century, the decree for the expulsion of Jews from Spain and, at the end of the sixteenth century, its extension to Portuguese territory absorbed by the Spanish crown, caused a migration of Jews and converted Jews (conversos) to other countries. Many international merchants, be they Jews or conversos, travelled to the French Atlantic ports, in particular Rouen and Nantes. The women from these

  International Traders 

  237

merchant families, especially those of Spanish origin, were especially active in business, not only as widows, after inheriting the running of the business, but also as unmarried or married women, when they were nominated to represent husbands who often travelled. The fact they belonged to a community with a strong identity both in terms of language and origin, and also of religion, gave these women a pivotal role, particularly in the initial period after migration, when their networks of contacts were not sufficiently strong and structured to trust people from outside the family. In the very first generations, the women from these Spanish families, although not numerous, were particularly active: in Rouen they participated in the foundation of the merchant Court, and in Nantes, in trading partnerships between France and Spain. They were more aggressive in business than their French counterparts or even than Portuguese women immigrants to France, especially in the textile trade: Spanish wool traded with France or French linen with Latin America. The names of six independent female merchants frequently appear in the accounts books of the most famous Spanish merchant in Nantes in the sixteenth century, André Ruiz, beginning with his wife and his sister, exporters of Breton textiles; in 1553, Ysabel de Santo Domingo, importer of dyes and fish oil, owned goods on nine of the ships that arrived in port; in 1554, Ysabel de la Presa exported paper and books on four of Ruiz’s ships, and also Juana de Miranda, Margarita de Villadiego and Yñes de Lerma. In some instances, the women worked in partnership with other merchants, sometimes alone, but most of the time they owned the goods they traded. In the sixteenth century, the most successful businesswoman in Rouen, was undoubtedly Marie de Sandelin, the widow of the Spanish merchant Jehan de Aranda, who had nominated her, in his will, the guardian of his children and heiress to his business, which was renamed: “Marye Sandelin and heirs of Jehan de Aranda”. Because the trading company was registered in Anvers, Marie made use of a network of agents and intermediaries, including her son, but retained, as ‘general manager’, control of the business. The case of Marie de Quintanadoines, the French version of her name, Quintanadueñas, predates a development which, a few generations later, became widespread in many such families. Marie continued her husband’s business as a widow, trading in textiles and reinvesting her profits in the acquisition of land. Progressively, in many cases, integration

238 

A. Bellavitis

at the highest levels of local society and marriages to French families would bring nobility status, transforming the women from these families into savvy administrators, not of merchant companies, but of land, castles and estates (Brunelle 2012). Other studies have highlighted the pivotal role played by women in Jewish merchant families: for example, Glikl bas Judah Leib (1646/1647–1724), a Jewish merchant from Hamburg, who, at the end of the seventeenth century, ran her trading company after her husband died, leaving her with eight children. Glikl owned a stocking factory; she imported goods from the Low Countries, which she sold in her shop; she bought pearls from the Jewish merchants in the city, which she sold on; she went to the Brunswick and Leipzig trade fairs, lent money and signed bills of exchange all over Europe. Her business partners were her family members, scattered all around Europe, and she was always accompanied on her travels by one of her children, since a respectable woman did not travel alone. Furthermore, she took advantage of the trips for the engagement and marriage of her children to do business. For example, when her daughter Esther married in Amsterdam, Glikl made the most of it by selling some precious stones there. Glikl bas Judah Leib is known to us, thanks to her autobiography, an exceptional document, studied by Natalie Zemon Davis (1995). Port cities and, more generally, mercantile cities, from which men were often absent on business, were favourable ground for the empowerment of women. We could even go as far as saying that, in certain European contexts, the maritime and economic expansion of the early Modern Age was at the root of a ‘revolution’ in gender roles, which could be compared to what happened in the West during the two World Wars, when, in the absence of men, women took on roles and responsibilities that were totally new to them (Polónia 2009). In Portuguese coastal towns, in the sixteenth century, women shipowners were active participants in companies involved in the fishing and sale of Newfoundland cod, and also in the import of fabrics from London or other European towns, or in the export of wine. In Aveiro, in 1552, 19 of the 70 registered ships belonged entirely or in part to women, many of whom were widows (Abreu-Ferreira 2000). According to the Venetian ambassador Andrea Navagero, in 1525 Seville was “in the hands of women”, and many notarial deeds document

  International Traders 

  239

the transactions carried out by women whilst their husbands were in the Indies (Perry 1990: 14). Similar observations have been left to us by another Italian, Ludovico Guicciardini, who, in 1567, wrote that women in Antwerp did business like men, which made them “too proud” (Lis and Soly 2012: 291; Van Aert 2007). We observe that the opposition is not between Northern and Southern Europe, nor between Catholic and Protestant Europe: Seville is a Catholic city in Southern Europe and Antwerp a Catholic city in Northern Europe. Sixteenth-century notarial deeds from Seville also show that there were women independently investing in trade by founding merchant companies, sometimes with other women only, even if it was more practical to have a male agent to conduct business in the Indies (Perry 1990). The surprise expressed by those Italian nobles could lead us to an enduring stereotype, that the position of Italian women was worse than that of women in other European countries. However, in Vicenza and Verona, there were women from their same social class involved in the production of silk fabrics that they exported to Lyon or Antwerp, such as the noblewomen Bianca Nievo Angaran and Laura Thiene Trissino, from Vicenza or Virginia Bevilacqua, the widow of count Michele Emilei, from Verona. In the 1560s and 1570s, four companies in Verona bore women’s names: the Giustina Micheli, Giacomo Amigoni e compagni (Giustina Micheli, Giacomo Amigoni and company), the rason de Verona conosuta col nome de Caterina Zucconi dal Cavallo e soci (company from Verona known as Caterina Zucconi dal Cavallo and partners), the Armerina Cossali e compagni (Armerina Cossali and company) and the Virginea Bernardi dalla Rota e compagni (Virginea Bernardi dalla Rota and company). They produced wool and silk garments which they generally sold outside the Venetian Republic, mainly in Germany, but also in France, Flanders or in central and southern Italy. They were not merely a nominal presence, given that notarial deeds document their buying and selling activities, the appointment of agents and the owners’ supervision of the accounts. Similar examples are also available from Vicenza (Demo 2012). In the majority of cases, the women involved in long-distance trade or shipping activities were widows (Dufournaud and Michon 2003). In Antwerp, Anna Janssens, upon the death of her husband, a beer brewer

240 

A. Bellavitis

and hops merchant, in addition to continuing his activities, started an import-export business with the Canary Islands and the Iberian Peninsula in partnership with her brothers and, in partnership with other important merchants and prominent locals, was active in construction, ending her business career as a money lender. When she died, in 1581, she was one of the richest citizens in Antwerp. Margrita van Valckenburgh, the daughter of a rich silk merchant from Antwerp, moved to Amsterdam, and following her husband’s death, she replaced him as a partner in the East India Company and successfully continued in his business, even managing, in 1624, to obtain a monopoly on the import of caviar from Russia that lasted ten years. Margrita was the first and only woman to hold the title of bewindhebber, or active partner, in the East India Company (Lis and Soly 2012). However, we do not only find widows as businesswomen active in international trade. Many married women conducted a different business from their husbands’, benefiting from the status of female merchant. This was true, for example, of Marie Billon, from Nantes, wife of Pierre Barateau, a specialist in the fish trade. In 1699 she was defined as female merchant in a document listing her creditors, other merchants in the city, to whom she owed the not indifferent sum of 68,000 livres. Her creditors allowed her an extension for a further eight months on condition she take on “an assistant in her shop to enter in a particular book the sales she makes and the money she receives in cash and bank notes”. Her creditors therefore imposed an external check on her cash register, revealing little faith in Marie’s accountancy skills or, more likely, some degree of doubt over her honesty (Dufournaud and Michon 2006). Similarly, in Cadiz, during the eighteenth century, there was an increase in the notarial deeds giving power of attorney, which merchants and shipowners leaving for the colonies used to name their wives as their legal representatives, to such an extent that, at the end of the century and in the first decades of the following, they prompted a backlash from the conservative press (Fernández Pérez 1997). Unmarried women could also invest in maritime trade, and not just as the daughters, sisters or nieces of a merchant who, by proxy, had left his business in their care whilst he had to be away. Port cities offered many opportunities to make money to those willing to take risks: some good

  International Traders 

  241

profit could be made by entrusting the captain of a ship with some goods to sell in other ports, and sometimes even enough for a dowry. Marriage contracts would then specify the sum that, thanks “to profits made at sea”, a wife added to her own dowry: even girls from modest beginnings, who worked as domestic servants, invested their own savings in such a way (Dufournaud and Michon 2006). The development of international trade and maritime routes during the early modern age is enough to explain the reason for the prevalence of port cities in the locations where we find merchant companies and partnerships run by widows. In Seville, between 1650 and 1700, out of the 762 exporters 47 were women and, in Barcelona, 5 per cent of the partners in the 151 merchant partnerships registered with notaries between 1650 and 1720 were widows, their husbands’ beneficiaries or usufructuaries. In colonial Latin-American society, the presence of women was even more significant: in Rio de la Plata, between 1778 and 1810, around 19 per cent of international merchants were women (Solà 2009). From the 1660s, Nantes was the epicentre of the sugar trade with the Antilles and, in the 1700s, it became the first slave port in the Kingdom of France. The public and private sources enlighten us as to the activities of merchants’ widows such as Elisabeth Bureau, the widow of René Montaudouin: she was a shipowner conducting business independently or with her son. In fact, the association between a widowed mother and her children was sometimes formalised with a notarial contract, called ‘treaty’, ‘convention’ or ‘association’, to which a ‘promise’ was added. The contract outlined the duration and purpose of the association, and the sum of capital brought to it by each partner. For example, in the contract drawn up between Françoise Despinoze and her sons, she was entitled to half the earnings, her eldest son to a third and her youngest to a sixth. In some cases, the partnership was formalised upon the son’s marriage and, then, his wife’s dowry was assumed into the capital of the partnership. However, it could also happen that a daughter’s husband, upon marrying her, contributed a sum to be assumed into the capital of the partnership. The reasons for forming a partnership with a son were sometimes outlined in the agreement: this was the case for Marie Geraldin, who, in 1701, wrote in the preamble of the contract that she had “many children and a great deal of business, many goods to sell, dues and credit to collect,

242 

A. Bellavitis

both in this kingdom and in England, Ireland, Spain, Holland, and other foreign countries, which would give her no small amount of difficulties if she was forced to go in person to all of those places to demand and cash in those dues and credits, and furthermore she would have to abandon the everyday business that her husband had conducted, which she wished to continue”. The company traded with Marseille, Holland, Flanders and Spain, but also with Martinique and Cape Verde: it was, then, a rather precocious, triangular slave trade. Marie Geraldin remained active in business until her death in 1709, 25 years after her husband’s. Among her interests there was even privateering: her company armed half of the Irish corsair ships in Nantes during the Nine Years’ War. It can be gleaned from the contract how, for a widow, the possibility of running a commercial company clashed with the fact that travelling was difficult or impossible. This task was therefore left to her sons or sons-in-law or, whilst her children were under-age, to agents (Dufournaud and Michon 2006). In the mid-eighteenth century, in cities such as Amsterdam, London and Hamburg, between 5 and 15 per cent of the wealthiest merchants were widows. The presence of women as owners of merchant companies increased between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thanks to the increased use of commercial methods that allowed merchants to work on commission without having to travel, by using the services of intermediaries and suppliers. In the Holy Roman Empire, the development of family-run commercial companies, after 1648, led many big commercial centres to pass laws that recognised the legal rights of businesswomen. In Augsburg, Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig, many important commercial and manufacturing businesses were run by independent merchants’ widows. Anna Barbara Grignoux, from Augsburg, the head of a company producing printed cotton fabrics which, in 1780, employed 500 workers, divorced her second husband so as not to give him control of the company. Helen Amalie Krupp (1732–1810), from Essen, widowed at the age of 25, invested in mining companies and foundries in the Rhineland, thus vastly increasing the family fortune and refused, right up to her death, to entrust their running to her sons and grandsons. In most instances, widows were not simple replacements whilst they waited for their sons to take charge of the business. In Brussels, in the eighteenth century, we find a woman at the head of a bank: Barbe-Louise Stoupy

  International Traders 

  243

(1706–1775), widow of Matthias de Nettine, who was able to develop the bank’s activities, to the point of influencing the political decisions of the Imperial administration, and to succeed in preventing the creation of a national bank in the Austrian Netherlands (Lis and Soly 2012). Between the second half of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth, the registers of the port of Stralsund, the capital of Swedish Pomerania and ancient port city of the Hanseatic League, reveal the important role played by women in international trade. In 1778, Christina Brandenburg and Christina Maria Bohnstedt were among the major exporters of wheat; in 1796, Elisabeth Dorothea Harloff shipped two of the largest wheat consignments in the year, one to Rotterdam, and the other to Newcastle and, in the same year, we find Catharina Juliana Muggenburg as one of the biggest importers of tobacco. The examples could go on: out of the 507 merchants’ resident in Stralsund between 1755 and 1815, 54 were women, that is 11 per cent of the total, 50 of them widows and the remaining four unmarried women. Contrary to what we might expect, the presence of women waned over the century: after 1785, just half remained active, and predominantly in regional trade. In 1755, 20 per cent of wheat exporters were women, whose turnover made up 13 per cent of the total. In 1765 and 1778, women made up 13 and 7 per cent of the wheat exporters respectively, and their turnover was a little less than 8 per cent. A significant female presence in international trade has also been shown to have existed in other cities of the ancient Hanseatic League, such as in Lubeck (11 per cent of merchants in 1743 and 6 per cent in 1784), and in Swedish cities, such as Gothenburg (in 1810, 12 per cent of merchants’ houses were in widows’ names) and in the Norwegian capital (14 per cent of the merchants in 1743, 8 per cent in 1791). The female merchants in Stralsund all came from merchant families and almost always came from the city or its surrounding areas. They were almost all widows of merchants and many had small children, half of them remarried. They worked in all of the sectors of wholesale trade: wine, salt, textiles, spices, cereals, wool and porcelain, but very rarely in sectors such as timber or construction materials. They had contacts in various centres of international trade: Stockholm, Saint Petersburg, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Berlin, Bordeaux, Leipzig, Liverpool and London. As all the European merchants of a

244 

A. Bellavitis

c­ ertain standing, their interests were not limited to business, but extended to the production of beer and vinegar, to the running of taverns and to lending. In most cases, their activities lasted a considerable time, between 2 and 28 years, with an average of 9.8. Some of these women had exceptional careers, such as Catherine Dorothea Hagemeister, formerly Panssow, who took over her dead husband’s business at the age of 49 and administered them until her death aged 77. Interesting results emerge from the comparison of bankruptcy figures by gender: 6 per cent for women and 15 per cent for men: could this mean that women opted for less risky investments than men? Certainly, to find themselves at the head of mercantile companies, these women had to have a skillset, acquired from both their families of origin and their married lives, but they also had to win their husbands’ trust, since it was only by virtue of their wills that widows could gain control of the business (Rabuzzi 1995). To obtain the right to participate in the commercial world, in addition to her husband’s authorisation on his deathbed, society and its trading and economic institutions had to accept the fact that a woman would assume control of the business. In the eighteenth century, the petitions presented to this end by Catalan widows played upon their maternal duties, which required them to take care of the business for the good of their children, as if it were necessary to use such a strategy to make female presence in a commercial or industrial company acceptable. In 1799, widow Paula Llorens from Barcelona addressed a full 16-page letter to King Charles IV to request authorisation, despite the fact that the regulations of the carters’ guild forbade it, to lend her cart to her sons-in-law to transport dyes and chemical products from the port to their warehouses in the city. In the letter, to which the King replied favourably, but a good six months later, Paula did not talk about her experience as a merchant but only of her family duties. Similarly, in 1789, Rita Gerle presented a petition to the city’s trade authority, the Junta de Comercio, to be allowed to take over her deceased husband’s business, a manufacturer of printed silk fabrics, a very new and successful industry in Spain at the time. In spite of the fact that she had already remarried a hairdresser, Rita requested, in order to be able to support her children and father, permission to continue the business that she had run alongside her husband for 21 years. The petition must have been unsuccessful since, a year later, she

  International Traders 

  245

presented another one, requesting to take the mercantile authorities’ exams, to prove her skills in the manufacture of printed silk fabrics. Faced with the resistance of the Junta, her strategy won through when she abandoned the family litany to instead assert her right on the basis of the 1779 royal decree which established that women must not “be barred from being taught all those tasks and products appropriate to their sex […] regardless of any privilege or prohibition contained in the ordinances of the guilds of masters” (Vicente Valentin 2004: 187). A fine example of a woman’s career in the business world is that of Madame de Maraise, wife of one of Oberkampf ’s partners, in the eighteenth century a major French producer of printed fabrics. The company, founded in 1760 in Jouy, not far from Versailles, owed its fortune largely to this woman who was in fact, for 22  years, that is from her marriage to the breaking of her partnership contract with Oberkampf, its commercial and finance director. Under her management, the company’s capital more than doubled and the Jouy manufacturing became the second largest company in terms of capital in France, second only to the royal manufacture of glass in Saint-Gobain. Born in 1737 to a merchant family from Rouen, Marie-Catherine-Renée Darcel was 30 when she married Sarrasin de Maraise, Oberkampf ’s partner and 12  years her senior. She had an excellent education in accounting, and also in literature; she spoke English and probably even German. She was certainly partial to the Anglomania which swept up the century, and she loved English novels. However, first and foremost she was the company’s agent in Rouen and was therefore in charge of purchasing fabrics at the city’s textile market, the Halle aux toiles. Marie-Catherine-Renée’s business acumen became apparent right from her marriage contract, which states that a portion of the 30,000 livres that made up her dowry came from “savings from her own business”. Can we then speak of a marriage of convenience on the groom’s part, and maybe on the bride’s too? This was certainly a marriage “of reason”, an association of purpose and professionalism, which was fruitful indeed (Chassagne 1981). The role played by Madame de Maraise in the running of the company was not formalised by a contract of some kind, but in practice, whilst her husband spent most of his time in the countryside, devoting himself to hunting and building a network of contacts useful to the business; she did all of

246 

A. Bellavitis

the office work, recording in a double-entry bookkeeping system all of the income and expenditure in terms of cash and goods. In the hefty correspondence with her ‘Dear Partner’ Oberkampf, she said she was ‘chained’ to her office in Paris, which she very rarely left, considering her presence to be ‘necessary’. Some passages from a letter sent on the 22nd of December clearly illustrate her concerns: The sales from Jouy from the 6th until to the 19th inst. amount to 340 pieces, three bills for 22,595 livres, 4 sous and 3 déniers. The largest items are: M. Jacquemard 81 pieces of fabric: 6,340 livres; Daulne and Margueritte 72 pieces: 4,898 livres; the widow of Mr Damard from Melun 40 pieces: 2,391 livres, 10 sous. She paid in cash; because her company is excellent we gave her a 4 per cent discount, even though we had only promised her 3 per cent. […] M. Jean Preiswerk and sons wrote to us saying that on the 4th inst. they sent the 29 bales to M. Patinot. We have heard nothing about them yet, despite having written to M. Ferrand […]. We thought you had said that in future you would ask him to contact M. Patinot in Bar-le-Duc directly, at the service of M. Ferrand, to carry out our orders. (Chassagne 1981: 75, letter 9)

Madame de Maraise promptly informed Oberkampf of income and expenditure, of missed payments and was very attentive in demanding late payments before the debtor went bankrupt: “In general”, she wrote on the 9th of December 1769, “very few people like to pay up and the major companies are sometimes the most difficult. Despite my bad reputation and all the facilities we give them to ease payment, our current account is still owed 537,004 livres as of the 22nd of November”. Ten years later, the situation was similar: “I have recovered some old credits: what a thankless task!” She was trying to make her ‘Dear Partner’ understand her business principles: it was better to pay suppliers regularly, rather than circulating bills of exchange which incurred commission and brokerage fees. When Oberkampf went to London for the first time in 1773, to the annual sale of the East India Company, Madame de Maraise stayed in Paris to monitor exchange rates, “to understand at which point it was better to pay and whether it was better to do so from Paris to London or vice-versa”. She was also very aware of the political situation

  International Traders 

  247

and when, at the end of 1776, the likelihood of a French military intervention alongside American insurgents grew, the Maraise couple were “on the hunt for news, to arrange our purchases accordingly”. In her office, Madame de Maraise centralised all of the information useful to the purchasing of raw materials needed in the production of printed fabric: lead acetate from Marseille or Amsterdam, Senegalese rubber from London, Baltic potassium from Bordeaux, Indigo from the Antilles and white canvas from Rouen. She had eight children, two of which, her third and fifth, died not long after birth. A follower of Rousseau, she breastfed them herself, but was away from her office for a maximum of 15 days after each birth (Chassagne 1981: letters 1, 6, 7, 8, 12, 15). We know Madame de Maraise’s life in detail, thanks to the existence of a precious collection of letters, and above all to Serge Chassagne’s research, who discovered it and made it available. The extraordinary nature of the story lies not only in the documents, but in the fact that this was a married woman who had no formal entitlement to actually manage an important industry: in reality Oberkampf was not her ‘Dear Partner’, but her husband’s. From the beginning there has been an insistence on the need to find more historical sources, and the events described above confirm this: these sources exist and are merely awaiting to be found by historians. Historical research calls into question the gender identities assigned to crafts, occupations and activities: in the past as nowadays, women and men could take on the same responsibilities, perform the same roles and carry out the same jobs. It was society that determined who was allowed to do what, but family events, individual circumstances, economic junctures or political crises could upset the established hierarchies, and create unforeseen and rapidly changing alliances between individuals and institutions. Social history and microhistory have taught us to seek out the historical truth in the cracks, in the margins and in the conflicts, and to highlight the opportunities for negotiation and mediation available to people and which they were able to use to their advantage. It is not a case of denying the existence of exploitation, exclusion and injustice, but of always bearing in mind that many situations were possible “under the patriarchal umbrella”.

248 

A. Bellavitis

References Abreu-Ferreira, D. (2000). Fishmongers and Shipowners: Women in Maritime Communities of Early Modern Portugal. The Sixteenth Century Journal, 31(1), 7–23. Beauvalet-Boutouyrie, S. (2001). Être veuve sous l’Ancien Régime. Paris: Belin. Brunelle, G.  K. (2012). The Price of Assimilation: Spanish and Portuguese Women in French Cities, 1500–1650. In D. Catterall & J. Campbell (Eds.), Women in Port. Gendering Communities, Economics and Social Networks in Atlantic Port Cities, 1500–1800 (pp. 155–182). Leiden/Boston: Brill. Chassagne, S. (1981). Une femme d’affaires au XVIIIe siècle. Toulouse: Privat. Colesanti, G. T. (2010). I libri di contabilità di Caterina LLull i Sabastida (XV sec.). Genesis, IX(1), 135–160. Demo, E. (2012). Donne imprenditrici nella terraferma veneta della prima età moderna (secoli XV–XVI). Archivio Veneto, 3, 85–95. Dufournaud, N., & Michon, B. (2003). Les femmes et l’armement morutier. L’exemple des Sables-d’Olonne pendant la première moitié du XVIIIe siècle. Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest, 110(1), 93–113. Dufournaud, N., & Michon, B. (2006). Les femmes et le commerce maritime à Nantes (1660–1740). Un rôle largement méconnu. Clio. Histoire‚ femmes et sociétés, 23, 311–330. Fernández Pérez, P. (1997). El rostro familiar de la metropóli. Redes de parentesco y lazos mercantiles en Cádiz, 1700–1812. Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno de España Editores. Lis, C., & Soly, H. (2012). Worthy Efforts: Attitudes to Work and Workers in Pre-­ industrial Europe. Leiden/Boston: Brill. Mende, M. (2009). Transcending Guild Boundaries and Becoming Entrepreneurs of Political Impact. Families of the 18th Century Thuringian and Hanoverian Wollen Trades. In S.  Cavaciocchi (Ed.), La famiglia nell’economia europea, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studio della Fondazione Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (pp.  343–354). Florence: Firenze University Press. Musgrave, E. (1993). Women in the Male World of Work: The Building Industries of Eighteenth-Century Brittany. French History, 7(1), 30–51. Perry, E. (1990). Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Polónia, A. (2009). Women’s Participation in Labour and Business in the European Maritime Societies in the Early Modern Period. A Case Study

  International Traders 

  249

(Portugal, 16th Century). In S. Cavaciocchi (Ed.), La famiglia nell’economia europea, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studio della Fondazione Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (pp. 705–719). Florence: Firenze University Press. Rabuzzi, D. A. (1995). Women as Merchants in Eighteenth-Century Northern Germany: The Case of Stralsund, 1750–1830. Central European History, 28(4), 435–456. Solà, A. (2009). Las mujeres como productoras autónomas en el medio urbano (siglos XIV–XIX). In C. Borderías (Ed.), La historia de las mujeres: perspectivas actuales (pp. 225–265). Barcelona: Icaria Editorial. Van Aert, L. (2007). The Legal Possibilities of Antwerp Widows in the Late Sixteenth Century. The History of the Family, 12(4), 282–295. Vicente Valentín, M. (2004). Textual Uncertainties: The Written Legacy of Women Entrepreneurs in Eighteenth-Century Barcelona. In M.  Vicente Valentín & L.  R. Corteguera (Eds.), Women, Texts and Authority in Early Modern Spanish World (pp. 183–195). Aldershot/Burlington: Ashgate. Zemon Davis, N. (1995). Women on the Margins. Three Seventeenth-Century Lives. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Part IV Conclusions

18 Conclusion: Changes and Continuity

We have examined women’s work activities in many sectors, always trying to highlight the institutional context, that is the regulatory framework within which these activities took place, therefore insisting on the legislative aspects and on the limits imposed by urban institutions. In conclusion of this overview, which was intended to be as European as possible, we have seen that, in the early modern times, women were present in many if not all sectors of the economic and productive life of the cities, in situations of dependence but also of power. Many were exploited and marginalised, their skills were often unrecognised, but some of them had economic power roles, gave orders and exploited other women and men. The data available to us speaks for itself: according to the 1796 Bologna census, 68.3 per cent of female heads of households, 63 per cent of married women, 52.7 per cent of daughters, 38.9 per cent of female, live-in relatives and 62.7 per cent of female, unrelated cohabitants carried out paid work. Of these 23.6 per cent were spinners and 18.8 per cent were servants (Palazzi 1990). According to the 1802 Turin census, 33.3 per cent of women over the age of 15, 21.7 per cent of married women, 55.7 per cent of unmarried women over 25 and 48.6 per cent of widows carried out paid work (Zucca Micheletto 2008, 2013). According to the 1810 Tillburg census, 42 per cent of married women carried out paid © The Author(s) 2018 A. Bellavitis, Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96541-3_18

253

254 

A. Bellavitis

work and 94 per cent of them were spinners; 96 per cent of the wives of wool-combers, 89 per cent of the wives of spinners, 83.3 per cent of the wives of wool carders and 68 per cent of the wives of weavers had a registered occupation (Schmidt and van Nederveen Meerkerk 2012; van Nederveen Meerkerk 2008). In Lyon, from 1786 to 1789, in 70 per cent of marriage contracts the bride had an occupation (Garden 1970); in Krakow, in 1629, 70 per cent of the market stalls were run by women (Karpinski 1990); in Leiden, in 1710, women accounted for 60 per cent of greengrocers and, from 1685 to 1795, applied for 93 per cent of fishmongers’ licences (van der Heuvel 2007); in 1733, in Zaragoza, women made up to 10 per cent of innkeepers (Ramiro Moya 2012). This data speaks volumes, but is nevertheless incomplete, because women’s activities would often not be revealed by censuses, especially when it came to married women. Data from legal sources gives fuller results: in London, from 1695 to 1725, 81 per cent of unmarried women, 60 per cent of married women and 85 per cent of widows appearing in the Consistory Court carried out paid work (Earle 1989). Still in London, from 1728 to 1800, 99 per cent of married women appearing in Criminal courts carried out paid work (Erickson 2008). But these results can be considered incomplete as well, because the care and reproduction work done by women in the home was never quantified. In the sixteenth century, if in Venice, a maid was paid a maximum of 38 lire a year (760 soldi), and a wet nurse 7 lire a month (1680 soldi a year) in addition to board and lodging, can we say that a woman doing the same job at home contributed an equivalent sum to her family’s income? In the same years, a construction worker earned about 20 soldi a day, a master mason about 30, a worker in the State Arsenal between 8 and 10 soldi a day, depending on the season, and a qualified porter between 10 and 13 soldi a day, and none of them worked continuously throughout the year (Pullan 1964). If at the hospital of Santiago de Compostela a female “lower” nurse was paid 266 reales per year and a female “lower” cook 200 reales per year (Rey Castelao 2010), can we say that if the same care work was carried out by a woman for her family, the equivalent sum went to enrich her city’s or country’s, or simply her family’s GDP?

  Conclusion: Changes and Continuity 

255

The most recent statistics on GDP in all EU countries include prostitution, the production and trafficking of drugs, as well as the smuggling of alcohol and tobacco, whereas this is not yet the case with unpaid care and domestic work. In the 1970s, some feminist movements proposed that wages should be paid to housewives for the homework. The fact that domestic work might have a quantifiable monetary value is not revealed by data on employment or wages, but may be revealed by indirect sources such as wills, diaries and correspondence, when a member of the family receives a gift for his or her contribution to the care work: for example, in 1538, a Venetian merchant made a gift of 100 ducats to his sister who had assisted him during his illness.1 Domestic work could also be an integral part of the activity of the artisan’s workshop, and still not receive a fee: in seventeenth-century Rome, a company contract between artisans specified that one of the two partners’ wives would cook for both, but without receiving any fee for the preparation of food (Ago 1998: 24). Most of the time, women’s wages were lower than men’s, in similar occupations. Certainly, not all women were paid less than men: in sixteenth-­century Venice, a female apprentice silk weaver was paid more than a male apprentice linen weaver, but within the guild of silk weavers, mistresses were paid less than masters. Competition between men and women on the labour market is a constant, long-term fact, which is still continuing and perhaps one that should be taken more into account. During the sixteenth century, the German weavers who wanted to exclude women from the production of hand-knitted stockings, alleging that even that kind of production was too skilled for them, even though, in the past, it had always been carried out by women (Wiesner 1996); in seventeenth-­century Rouen, the young master printers who claimed that it was not fair that “a man who has six children should abandon them and a girl take his place, while she could do something else” (Skora 2015); in eighteenth-century Gorizia, the silk weavers who refused to allow women “the freedom to work at the looms” because they “would abandon the other more tedious and less lucrative jobs to stick to the easiest and most advantageous one” (Poni 1996) show that competition between men and women on the labour market is a very long-term issue, but also that the male breadwinner model is not at all an invention of recent centuries, but a structure of a very long duration.

256 

A. Bellavitis

The most recent research into the gender pay-gap in England from 1260 to 1850 shows that male wages were twice or three times higher than female wages, but also that female wages per year were, overall, higher than female wages paid for casual work: Jane Humphries and Jakob Weisdorf get to the conclusion that “women servants did not share the post-Black Death ‘golden age’ and so offer little support for a ‘girl-­ powered’ economic breakthrough; and second that during the Industrial Revolution, women who were unable to work long hours lost ground relative to men and to women who could work full-time and fell increasingly adrift from any ‘High Wage Economy’” (Humphries and Weisdorf 2015: 405). In Dutch textile manufacturing, spinning was carried out by both men and women and, in some sectors, male and female wages were equivalent. The time spent on spinning in a week was also the same, even for mothers with young children. However, these were the least paid sectors, in which almost all women worked, while men had also access to better paid sectors of the textile industry. In fact, in periods of expansion of the textile industry, when it was easy to find work, men could turn to more skilled and better paid sectors, while in times of contraction, men and women crowded into the same sectors, receiving lower wages even if equivalent. At the end of this analysis, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk concludes that, “income differentials between men and women must be attributed not solely to productivity differences, nor to wage discrimination alone. Rather, apparently free market mechanisms can have underlying discriminatory foundations, based on gender inequalities in the labour market and widely supported societal norms about men’s and women’s work roles” (van Nederveen Meerkerk 2010: 181). Wage fluctuations and periods of economic crisis can have consequences on marriage ages and marriage rates. Single women, as we have seen in the case of the Venetian silk workers, often could not pay their rent and not all the English single women were active entrepreneurs on the financial markets. In fact, even if marriage, as Moderata Fonte wrote at the end of the sixteenth century, was for women the loss of their freedom and the loss of their property, it still was an economic partnership, even where the couple’s properties remained legally separated, and above all among the artisans. Work was intermittent also for many men, and

  Conclusion: Changes and Continuity 

257

the makeshift economy dominant in the cities of early modern Europe. Continuity is what catches the eye most easily when it comes to women’s work, while it is often more difficult to highlight historical changes and evolutions. Since Joan Kelly asked, “Did women have a Renaissance?” the issue of chronologies has been a constant concern in women’s and gender history. The historical temporalities are naturally much more varied and contradictory than what is foreseen by the academic specialisations, and not only for the women (Kelly 1977; Wiesner 2008). We discussed what has been termed the ‘decline thesis’ and concluded that it cannot be considered a constant and long-term trend. Guilds were ready to open up to women if they needed to, and, for various reasons, ranging from concerns about the moral economy of weak subjects to the very interests of merchants occupying government positions, city governments could facilitate women’s work, sometimes even going against the wishes of craftsmen associated in guilds or adopting an indulgent attitude towards illegal activities carried out by women, such as the sale of prohibited products, smuggling or the exercise of certain activities without a licence. Similarly, research on nineteenth-century England has criticised the model, which sees the exclusion of women from the productive sphere as a consequence of a new ideal of “domesticity” (Phillips 2006; Barker 2006). Women from the middling sort continued to be active in the world of work, despite the affirmation of an ideology of ‘domesticity’, that was also a reaction to an era in which the idea that rights could be ‘universal’ had been dangerously spreading throughout Europe. In fact, economy and society need women’s productive activities and must therefore guarantee them the right to carry them out, even through transverse or ‘exceptional’ channels, as in the case of widows, or as in the case of measures that allowed the limits imposed by coverture to be overcome. On the contrary, certain historiographical models have hypothesised that some economic developments had positive consequences for women’s employment, as in the case of the protoindustry, which, however, has also had the effect of creating competition between female urban workers and female workers in the countryside, as happened in Barcelona wool manufacture. Other models, such as the industrious revolution, have suggested that economic development has been prompted by women, in the context of the increased availability of consumer goods linked to the

258 

A. Bellavitis

Dutch colonial expansion. Certainly, periods of economic expansion, such as the one experienced by the regions of north-western Europe during the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, have offered more job opportunities and potential economic autonomy to women. Much research on north-western Europe has insisted on the fact that new work opportunities opened up to women, in the context of the spreading of new patterns of consumption and new taste among urban populations. However, it is noteworthy that, during the eighteenth century, these phenomena were also to be found in more peripheral areas to north-western development such as Venice and Madrid (Plebani 2008; Lopez Barahona 2016) and in medium-sized cities such as Grenoble (Montenach 2015). As Victoria Lopez Barahona recently reminded, ready-to-wear fashion was not born in England at the end of the seventeenth century, but in the Italian and Flemish cities of the sixteenth century, “examples to which Madrid can be added” in the first half of the seventeenth century (López Barahona 2016: 209). Much has been done and much remains to be done to rethink the economic evolution of European societies in the past, including and valuing the contribution of women’s work. The interweaving of social and economic history and the history of law is a fundamental issue, highlighted by research for some time now, but it is also extremely complex, as any comparative or ‘transnational’ history is extremely complex. The Europe which is studied in this book is only a small part of the world and a limited part of Europe itself, the one on which research and attempts to propose new methodologies and new approaches to old problems, such as the supposed invisibility of women in historical sources, have been most concentrated. The economic evolutions of European regions in the early modern age are different and in some aspects ‘divergent’: understanding the role played by women’s activities in these evolutions is a great challenge for future research, that will help to rethink economic history as a whole. On 17 March 2016, the French daily newspaper Le Figaro published an article entitled “Are childcare facilities detrimental to full employment?”, in which it was stated that in France “the employment rate, i.e. the ratio of the working population to the working-age population, is 64.2 per cent, compared with 73.8 per cent in Germany, 71.9 per cent in

  Conclusion: Changes and Continuity 

259

the United Kingdom and 74.9 per cent in Sweden”. The article went on to state that “in France, the full-time employment rate for women is 43 per cent, compared with an average of 37 per cent for our European neighbours. This delay is partly explained by French family policies” (Luyssen 2016). In conclusion, if women did not have the opportunity to leave their children in nurseries to go and work outside the home on a full-time basis, they could, or rather should, work part time and thus leave jobs that could be taken up by men, to which, as the article implies, men are fully entitled. Opinions that sound not very different from those of the sixteenth-century German weavers, of the seventeenth-century Rouen printers or the eighteenth-century Gorizia weavers.

Note 1. ASVE: NT (Venice State Archives: Notaries, Last wills), b. 1102, 80, 1583, 23 October.

References Ago, R. (1998). Economia barocca. Mercato e istituzioni nella Roma del Seicento. Rome: Donzelli. Barker, H. (2006). The Business of Women. Female Enterprise and Urban Development in Northern England, 1760–1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Earle, P. (1989). The Female Labour Market in London in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries. Economic History Review, 42(3), 328–353. Erickson, A. M. (2008). Married Women’s Occupations in Eighteenth-Century London. Continuity and Change, 23(2), 267–307. Garden, M. (1970). Lyon et les Lyonnais au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Humphries, J., & Weisdorf, J. (2015). The Wages of Women in England, 1260– 1850. The Journal of Economic History, 75(2), 405–447. Karpinski, A. (1990). The Woman on the Market Place. The Scale of Feminization of Retail Trade in Polish Towns in the Second Half of the 16th and the 17th Century. In S. Cavaciocchi (Ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (pp. 283–292). Florence: Le Monnier.

260 

A. Bellavitis

Kelly, J. (1977). Did Women have a Renaissance ? In R. Bridenthal & C. Koonz (Eds.), Becoming Visible, Women in European History (pp. 21–47). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. López Barahona, V. (2016). Las trabajadoras en la sociedad madrileña del siglo XVIII. Madrid: ACCI. Luyssen, J. (2016). Quand “le Figaro” renvoie les femmes à la maison. http://www. liberation.fr/france/2016/03/24/quand-le-figaro-renvoie-lesfemmes-a-lamaison_1441692 Montenach, A. (2015). Creating a Space for Themselves on the Urban Market: Survival Strategies and Economic Opportunities for Single Women in French Provincial Towns (Seventeenth-Eighteenth Centuries). In J.  De Groot, I.  Devos, & A.  Schmidt (Eds.), Single Life and the City 1200–1900 (pp. 50–68). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Palazzi, M. (1990). “Tessitrici, serve, treccole”. Donne, lavoro e famiglia a Bologna nel Settecento. In S. Cavaciocchi (Ed.), La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti delle Settimane di studi dell’Istituto internazionale di Storia economica F. Datini di Prato (pp. 359–376). Florence: Le Monnier. Phillips, N. (2006). Women in Business, 1700–1850. Woodbridge: Boydell. Plebani, T. (2008). Socialità e protagonismo femminile nel secondo Settecento. In N.  M. Filippini (Ed.), Donne sulla scena pubblica. Società e politica a Venezia tra Settecento e Ottocento (pp. 25–80). Milan: Franco Angeli. Poni, C. (1996). Tecnologie, organizzazione produttiva e divisione sessuale del lavoro: il caso dei mulini da seta. In A. Groppi (Ed.), Il lavoro delle donne (pp. 269–296). Rome/Bari: Laterza. Pullan Brian, B. (1964). Wage-Earners and the Venetian Economy, 1550–1630. The Economic History Review, 16(3), 407–442. Ramiro Moya, F. (2012). Mujeres y trabajo en la Zaragoza del siglo XVIII. Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza. Rey Castelao, O. (2010). Trabajando a cubierto. Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, 40(2). http://mcv.revues.org/3575 Schmidt, A., & van Nederveen Meerkerk, E. (2012). Reconsidering the “First Male-Breadwinner Economy”: Women’s Labor Force Participation in the Netherlands, 1600–1900. Feminist Economics, 18(4), 69–96. Skora, S. (2015). Héritières et pionnières: les femmes et le livre à Rouen à l’époque moderne. In A. Bellavitis, V. Jourdain, V. Lemonnier-Lesage, & B. Zucca Micheletto (Eds.), «Tout ce qu’elle saura et pourra faire», Femmes, droits, travail en Normandie du Moyen Âge à la Grande Guerre (pp. 67–82). Mont Saint Aignan: Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre. van der Heuvel, D. (2007). Women and Entrepreneurship. Female Traders in the Northern Netherlands, 1580–1815. Amsterdam: Askant.

  Conclusion: Changes and Continuity 

261

van Nederveen Meerkerk, E. (2008). Couples Cooperating? Dutch Textile Workers, Family Labour and the ‘Industrious Revolution’, c. 1600–1800. Continuity and Change, 23, 237–266. van Nederveen Meerkerk, E. (2010). Market Wage or Discrimination? The Remuneration of Male and Female Wool Spinners in the SeventeenthCentury Dutch Republic. Economic History Review, 63(1), 165–186. Wiesner, M. E. (1996). Gender and the Worlds of Work. In B. Scribner (Ed.), Germany. A New Social and Economic History, vol. 1, 1450–1630 (pp. 209– 232). London/New York/Sidney/Auckland: Arnold. Wiesner, M. E. (2008). Do Women Need the Renaissance? Gender & History, 20(3), 539–557. Zucca Micheletto, B. (2008). Lavoro, figli ed economia domestica nella Torino di Antico Regime. Genesis, VII(1–2), 165–192. Zucca Micheletto, B. (2013). Reconsidering Women’s Labor Force Participation Rates in Eighteenth-Century Turin. Feminist Economics, 19(4), 200–223.

Index1

A

C

Actresses, 23, 95, 99, 104, 105 Agency, 5, 8, 13, 44, 69–81 Apprentices/apprenticeship, viii, 11, 12, 27, 45, 49, 50, 52, 59, 62, 71, 79, 80, 87, 100, 101, 105, 112, 130, 140, 148, 150, 152–154, 162, 171–175, 177–181, 184, 185, 187, 189–193, 197, 198, 201, 202, 204, 205, 211, 212, 214, 215, 227, 228, 255

Crafts/craftsmen/craftswomen, ix, 4, 6, 11–13, 23, 27, 33–36, 43, 45, 47–53, 60, 62–64, 71, 75, 78, 79, 81, 100, 105, 112, 118, 129, 138, 140, 150, 164, 165, 171–181, 184–194, 197–203, 206, 209, 210, 213, 216, 221, 222, 225, 227–229, 247, 257 Crisis, vii, 24, 31, 65, 122, 158, 162, 187, 195, 199, 215, 256 Customs, 75–77, 120, 135, 136, 188, 214 customary laws, 8, 70–73, 75, 76, 80

B

Bodies, ix, 11, 21, 27, 44, 102, 104, 111, 135, 153, 157–166, 188, 204 Breadwinner, 10

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2018 A. Bellavitis, Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96541-3

263

264 Index D

I

Daughters, 5, 8, 12, 24, 27, 31–39, 47, 49, 76–78, 88–90, 97, 99–101, 103, 105, 112, 116, 117, 122, 133, 137, 150, 151, 165, 171, 173–175, 180, 184–186, 191–194, 200, 202–204, 209–211, 213–216, 221, 238, 240, 241, 253 Dowry, 7, 8, 24, 36, 74–81, 103, 113, 116, 120–122, 161, 173, 176, 177, 210, 213, 241, 245

Identities, viii, 10, 12, 13, 19, 21, 22, 31, 32, 35, 38, 39, 51, 99, 111, 183, 187, 189, 190, 199, 221, 226, 230, 237, 247 Industrial revolution, 3, 10, 43, 61, 62, 64, 65, 69, 256 Industrious revolution, 62, 63, 257 Inheritance, 8, 23, 24, 63, 73–77, 79, 81, 99, 112, 115, 180, 186, 192, 210, 212, 224–226, 237 J

F

Families, viii, 4, 7, 9, 19, 26, 31–33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 43, 45, 47, 57–59, 61, 63, 69, 71, 75–81, 87, 90, 93, 95, 100, 101, 112, 115–118, 125, 131, 134–139, 141, 142, 150, 158–160, 171, 172, 174–176, 178, 179, 181, 183–195, 197, 198, 200, 202–205, 213, 215, 216, 221, 222, 232, 237, 238, 243, 244 G

Guilds, 11, 21, 43–53, 59, 73, 97, 129, 154, 172, 183–195, 197, 210, 219, 235, 244, 255 H

Heirs, 74, 81, 117, 187, 191, 237

Journalism/journalists, 91, 97–100 L

Law, ix, 7, 8, 10, 23, 46, 57, 69–77, 80, 90, 112–114, 116, 117, 129, 134, 138, 139, 152, 184, 192, 202, 203, 215, 225, 230, 232, 242, 258 M

Markets, vii, 4, 5, 9, 13, 21, 24, 28, 34, 39, 43, 47, 49, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 74, 79, 112, 113, 115, 134, 140, 161, 164, 177, 178, 183, 184, 189, 193, 194, 198, 200, 204, 215–217, 219–232, 236, 245, 254–256 Marriage, 8, 9, 36–38, 46, 47, 71, 75–80, 90, 101, 116, 117, 120, 124, 125, 133, 161, 177,

 Index 

178, 180, 183–187, 209, 210, 229, 238, 241, 245, 254, 256 Masters, 6, 12, 19–21, 33, 34, 36, 45–50, 60, 62, 64, 71, 79, 87, 103, 114–117, 121, 125, 130, 137, 171–178, 180, 184–188, 191, 192, 194, 197–200, 202–204, 206, 210, 211, 213–216, 225–228, 245, 254, 255 Merchants, 12, 13, 35, 37, 57–60, 62, 64, 72, 73, 77, 78, 95, 136, 161, 173, 180, 184, 185, 194, 195, 197, 198, 200, 202–204, 206, 222, 230, 236–245, 255, 257 Midwives, 21, 22, 37, 46, 111, 141, 145–155, 162 Migration, 26, 27, 113, 124, 125, 236, 237 Mistresses, 26, 49, 51, 60, 64, 73, 171, 172, 174–177, 188, 189, 192–194, 197, 199–204, 228, 255 Mobility, 28, 32, 75, 119, 125, 135, 230 Musicians, 102–104 N

Nurses, 6, 13, 24, 93, 131–133, 137, 139, 140, 254 P

Painters, 23, 100–102 Ports, 27, 61, 161–163, 235, 237, 238, 240, 241, 243, 244

265

Print/printing, 58, 90, 99, 102, 187, 209–217, 220, 231, 242, 244, 245, 247 Prostitutes/prostitution, ix, 13, 21, 22, 24, 26, 27, 33, 46, 48, 105, 111, 113, 157–165, 186, 190–192, 225, 255 Proto-industry, 20, 28, 61, 62, 64, 194, 257 S

Salaries, 24, 65, 79, 91, 93, 96, 97, 105, 118–122, 151, 172–174, 176, 177, 219 School/schooling, 20, 63, 87–89, 91–95, 97, 102, 151, 171, 176–178, 191 Sellers, 51, 79, 185, 191, 193, 221, 223, 229, 230 Service/servants, ix, 4, 6, 13, 19, 20, 22–24, 27, 32–34, 46, 48, 111–125, 131, 135, 137, 138, 140, 141, 164, 165, 173, 175, 178, 179, 186, 211, 222, 241, 242, 246, 253, 256 Shops, 6, 23, 36, 37, 49, 50, 58, 72, 77, 79, 164, 171–181, 184, 185, 193, 216, 221, 229, 238, 240 Silk, 13, 21, 23, 25, 36, 45, 49, 50, 59, 65, 80, 100, 138, 161, 173, 197–206, 227, 239, 240, 244, 245, 255, 256 Singers, 102, 103, 105 Slaves/slavery, 26, 59, 61, 111–125, 236, 241, 242

266 Index

Spouses, 8, 70, 72, 74–77, 81, 175, 185 T

Textile, 23, 33–35, 37, 47, 49, 62, 63, 65, 78, 120, 134, 165, 175, 176, 188, 189, 193, 206, 223, 229, 237, 243, 245, 256 Trade/traders, ix, 6, 9, 12, 13, 21, 23, 27, 33–39, 49, 50, 57–59, 61, 62, 70, 72, 76, 78, 79, 99, 100, 112, 113, 150, 153, 161–163, 172, 174, 180, 183–188, 193, 194, 212, 219–226, 229–232, 236–244 W

Wages, viii, 6, 9, 10, 13, 26, 44, 47, 50, 52, 60, 64, 65, 105, 112, 117–119, 121–124, 132–135, 137, 140–142, 149, 150, 173, 174, 176, 189, 201, 202, 204, 206, 229, 255, 256

Wet nurses, viii, 20, 22, 27, 111, 119, 132–142, 254 Widows/widowhood, 8, 22, 24, 26, 31–39, 45, 47–51, 73–78, 81, 97, 105, 112–114, 118, 122, 124, 130, 131, 138, 150, 152, 160, 161, 165, 183–188, 191, 192, 194, 200, 202, 210–217, 221–227, 229, 231, 235–244, 246, 253, 254, 257 Wives, viii, 5, 6, 8, 11, 12, 20, 22, 31–39, 45, 46, 49, 62, 70–74, 76–78, 81, 93, 95, 97, 105, 118, 131, 140, 141, 150, 151, 165, 175, 184–186, 188, 190–192, 194, 198, 200, 202, 204, 209, 212, 215, 216, 219, 221, 224, 226, 229–231, 240, 254, 255 Workshops, x, 6, 25, 32, 34, 36, 45, 48, 50–52, 59, 60, 63, 65, 75, 78, 79, 100–102, 112, 174, 181, 184–188, 191, 193, 198–200, 202–205, 209–217, 219, 221, 227, 228, 231, 255