How did the emergence of capitalism in modern Europe change women’s patterns of work?
The 17th century saw the emergence of capitalism, an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, as merchants created a link between consumers and producers. Recent work on European women in the early modern period as indeed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has increasingly stressed continuities. Much that we once thought of as representing the effects on women of the emergence of capitalism or of industrialisation, it is claimed, was already present long before the advent of either. Patterns of work include place of work, type of work, involvement in the labour force and attitudes towards working women.
In order to locate the continuities and changes in women’s patterns of work after the advent of capitalism in Europe, we must understand women’s patterns of work in early modern Europe in its pre-capitalist, pre-industrial era. Historian’s such as Shorter stress the subordinance of women in this time but revisionist historians such as Joan W. Scott have shown the important economic role that women played in this time. Historical and ethnographic evidence suggests that the women of the popular classes did not conform to Shorter's characterization of them as subordinate, dependent and powerless. The family was the elementary unit of work in pre-industrial Europe to the extent that the entire labour force could reasonably be called domestic workers, because almost all work in early modern Europe took place in and around the household. All members of the family, women and children as well as men, contributed to its wellbeing. Women were partners in the enterprise, whether it was a farm, a shop, or the less clearly defined economic unit of the urban poor family. In the pre-industrial family, the household was organized as a family or domestic economy. Olwen Hufton's work on the Parisian poor in the eighteenth century and Alan Forrest's on Bordeaux both describe the crucial economic contribution of urban working class women and the consequent central role these women played in their families. An observer in rural Brittany during the nineteenth century reported that the wife and mother of the family made "the important decisions, buying a field, selling a cow, a lawsuit against a neighbour, choice of a future son-in-law. In city and country, among propertied and property-less, women of the popular classes had a vital economic role. It is, of course, impossible to guess what sort of sexual relations were practiced under these circumstances as economic power did not always imply personal liberty. We can say, however, that women were not dependent and powerless in the economic sphere and their position in the family was hardly a subordinate one in the pre-Capitalist era.
To analyse ‘patterns of work’, we can look to the sectors and jobs in which women were largely employed before and after the emergence of capitalism to identify continuity or change. Most women worked for remuneration in early modern Europe and they were found in a remarkable variety of trades. Nevertheless, the great majority of women were employed in a small number of occupations preponderantly in the tertiary sector (domestic service, laundering, nursing and retail), in the textile and clothing trades and in agriculture. These patterns were not unique to this period and had already existed in the Middle Ages and persisted through the 19th century.
Domestic service, garment-making, and textiles had long been the chief non-agricultural employers of women. This continued to be the case during the nineteenth century. In France, in 1866, 69% of working women outside agriculture were employed in these three fields; in 1896, the percentage was 59%. In her study of women in the labour force in 1915, B.L. Hutchins noted that as late as 1911, 2/3 of working women were in the same three fields: domestic service (including laundry) 35%; textiles, 19.5%; garment making 15.6%. In the Viennese cotton firm of Schwechat in 1752 there were 893 men engaged in distribution of raw materials, cloth finishing, and weaving, and 5,655 women spinners working out of their homes. By the 1790s there were said to be over 4,300 machines in use in and around Barcelona, mostly operated by women in their own homes. In the Gabrovo area of Bulgaria in the central Balkans, starting at least by the early nineteenth century, women made up the majority of textile workers, engaging in both spinning and weaving in their homes. Furthermore, between 5-15% of the total urban population of western Europe were domestic servants and the percentage may have been still higher in parts of east-central Europe. Despite vast economic changes during this period, the vast majority of people in almost all parts of Europe continued to live in the countryside, producing agricultural products. Between 60% and 90% of the female labouring population continued to work in agriculture well into the 19th century and beyond, while in the great grain-exporting regions of eastern Europe it must have been closer to 95%. This was to last in most places until the onset of large-scale, mechanized industrialization in the mid- to late nineteenth century, and in areas that did not industrialize or did so only lightly, women’s heavy involvement in farm work persisted at least until the middle of the twentieth century. Therefore, a century after Shorter's supposed revolution in women's work experience, a large proportion of working women were still in domestic service, and most others were still engaged in traditionally organized industries suggesting continuity rather than change in the jobs in which women were employed.
That said, capitalism did create new sectors of work for women to involve themselves in. The massive increase in the size of armies that occurred in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries offered some women new opportunities working on the docks and the boats. Furthermore, the shift from a partially barter-based society to a largely cash-based one stimulated changed in money supply and debt. As a result, most of the population was chronically in debt to landlords, seed-suppliers, millers, grocers, bakers, tax collectors, business partners, money-lenders, suppliers, their employees, the local clergy and their own relatives. People dealt with this through judicious management of credit networks, begging, resort to institutional charity, and a variety of other measures that hovered on the border between theatre and fraud. Especially in the cities, women were usually the ones delegated to negotiate credit relationships with crucial agents like the landlord or the baker, because they were thought to be more skilled at appealing to creditors’ charitable instincts than men. While women’s work remained predominantly in the tertiary sector, there were small changes in the types of job available.
The evidence is strong that early modern societies constrained competition in large part by limiting women’s opportunities and where women were the target, poor women and women who were not (or not any longer) married to a man were especially disadvantaged. This in turn suggests that lessening or eliminating constraints on the free play of competition had and may still have potential to improve women’s lives. In the later eighteenth century as capitalist values took root, many parts of Europe saw a lessening of the various constraints on who could trade, especially in food. In Oxford in 1772 an old rule that hagglers, cattle drovers and corn sellers needed to be thirty years old, householders, male, and either married or widowers, lapsed and was not renewed. On the Continent various ‘enlightened despots’ – not least some popes – decided to put their weight behind liberalization. Significant market activity by women characterized most market towns in Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, and numerous Caribbean towns well into the nineteenth century and beyond, and was found in some parts of the Balkans and Anatolia as well. In Portugal market-women controlled bread-baking and fish-selling in many of the major towns and often worked closely with town governments to ensure the food supply. Market participation by Polish women, on the street and in stalls and shops, had been extraordinarily high in the seventeenth century, and though lower in the eighteenth it was still substantial. In Cracow in the late eighteenth century, thirty-nine per cent of single women were deriving their income from wholesale, retail or the sale of alcohol and women were also selling milk, clean water, tripe, oranges, hot food and cooking pots. By at least the seventeenth century, a separate women’s market (avrat pazari) had been established in Istanbul, and apparently in other towns where both the buyers and most sellers were female and women could shop in comfort and safety.
The easing of regulations undoubtedly helped women sellers but counterbalancing these changes was a trend for more established markets. ‘Established’ shop- keepers, usually, though not always men, had both increased incentive and enhanced organizational clout to exclude petty traders – sometimes using the argument that the latter represented ‘unfair competition’ since they did not have to pay fixed costs like shop-rent – but more often arguing that allowing women to sell openly either brought down the ‘tone’ of the market, or would actually encourage public lewdness and prostitution. Overall, while women occasionally dominated the urban marketplace, only rarely were they able to amass much profit. Women’s economic activities were restricted during the early modern period and their legal dependence on father or husband, unequal access to family resources and inability to receive formally acknowledges training adversely affected their economic position in the Middle Ages and continued to do so into the 19th century. The vast majority of women’s work continued for centuries to be low status, badly or unpaid, perceived as marginal yet essential to the operation of all urban and rural communities. Therefore, in terms of participation in the market, we can also identify continuity in trends from early modern Europe into the capitalist era.
Another aspect of work patterns which can be analysed in the physical location of the work women participated in. Structural changes in the organization of work such as introduction of new technology and the reduced return to profit from agricultural work created a number of changes for women’s work. Changes in the organization of work drove the daughters and wives of craftsmen out of the family shop. Similarly, population growth (a result of declining mortality and younger age at marriage due to opportunities for work in cottage industry) created a surplus of hands within the urban household and on the family farm. Women in these families always had been expected to work and increasingly they were sent away from home to earn their portion of the family wage. Eighteenth and early nineteenth century cities across Europe grew primarily by migration. The urban working class was thus constantly renewed and enlarged by a stream of rural migrants. Women were also no longer a part of a family production team and instead worked more often for an employer that paid them a wage. This proleratianization had important ramifications for women’s family activities. The decline of the household mode of production meant that women more often worker away from their homes. The concentration of certain jobs in specific regions or cities often drew young rural women farther from home to find employment. Therefore, it can be said that capitalism created change in the location of work for some women. Structural changes increased the numbers of women wage earners but the women themselves were motivated by values long familiar to the women of the popular classes. Family interest and not self-interest was the underlying motive for their work and therefore it was not an emancipation of women as some historians such as Shorter have indicated that led women to seek work away from home.
Industrial capitalism, coupled with European expansion into much of the rest of the world in the eighteenth, nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, exacerbated class and gender divisions and introduced new forms of race exploitation whose long-term effects are visible to this day. Between the 16th and 18th century women’s work opportunities were further constricted, the lines of demarcation between male and female work were more sharply drawn, specific occupations and types of labour became more decidedly identified with each gender and women’s work was widely devalued. The movement away from the family economy, introduction of heavy machinery essential to manufacturing and efficient labour as well as other factors related to the advent of capitalism created change in women’s patterns of work as the labour market became increasingly segregated. To understand women in traditional Europe, one must distinguish sharply between the sexual division of labour and the sexual division of social roles, between what one did, and how one was supposed to act. Within the craft shop or peasant household tasks were rigorously divided. Women had their own spheres, and the quickness of peasant widowers to remarry, for example, illustrates how vital their wives' contribution was to running the farm. So close did these traditional populations skirt the rim of subsistence that all hands were active, women's no less than men's. But in a pre-capitalist economy the importance of one's work is largely unrelated to one's social status. Doing such jobs as fattening the chickens or carding the wool did not necessarily mean that women enjoyed a status like that of the men they worked alongside. Though female contributions to the farm's prosperity were absolutely essential, the gender roles allocated them were all inferior and subordinate. It was these submissive sex roles, this lack of social, political and sexual autonomy that we should mean, not her economic authority within the household, which was considerable. It was capitalism that forged a link between the two, between roles and jobs, between work and status. The meaning of work changed because of the rise of capitalism from a medieval notion of work as all tasks which contributed to a family’s sustenance, to work as participation in the market economic and in production. Thus a woman’s finding food for her children by begging or keeping her family afloat through efficient micromanagement of the family finances were no longer considered work.
In terms of historiography, the last few decades have seen a growth of enthusiasm from some historians about the potential of market capitalism and industrialization for women. They argue that the free market and free enterprise systems are intrinsically egalitarian. The pro- market school concurs about the low status of women in pre-capitalist and pre-industrial economies, but it tends to view the culprits as trade-guilds, legal monopolies, licensing practices and closed professions almost all of which historically excluded women. Some historians have also grown more positive about the impact of early industrial capitalism on women, arguing that it offered women more opportunities than what it replaced, as well as, on the whole, higher wages and certainly a better standard of living. An implicitly pro-market orientation has also informed much new work on early modern women as consumers. Historians argue that shopping and consumption increased women’s mobility, allowed them numerous creative outlets, gave them more control of family finances, replaced some of their hard labour and gave them access to relatively liquid or fungible assets (material goods) that they could swap for money or use to accumulate social capital. Conversely, left-leaning women’s historians have shown how the commercialization of agriculture sustained and reinforced oppressive conditions for many women. They have demonstrated the links between the exploitation of female and child labour within the family and the early factory system’s heavy reliance on women and children as a cheap and easily manipulated labour-force.
In conclusion, though European women's work experienced significant change in the eighteenth century, many of its fundamental features remained the same. While it became harder and harder for women to find regular work in the fields, they still sat at their spinning wheels, only for longer hours and piecework rates of pay. Female labourers still received lower wages for similar tasks and worked in subordinate positions. The early modern period has been viewed as a time of tremendous economic change with the expansion of commercial capitalism, the beginning of proto-industrial production and the creation of a world market system because of European colonization. When we evaluate women’s economic role during this period, however, we find that continuities outweigh the changes. Women were increasingly pushed out of craft guilds but they were rarely full members sin the first place and while they took over new types of agricultural tasks, they continued to be paid only half of what men were paid. In examining the historical evidence for the effects on women's work of industrialization and urbanization, we find that the location of women's work did change–more young women worked outside the home and in large cities than ever before but they were recruited from the same groups which had always sent women to work and they entered occupations which traditionally had employed women. The aggregate view indicates that industrialization did not change the type of work women did, nor did it greatly increase the amount of time that women in the aggregate devoted to productive work for market exchange. Indeed, over the course of the 19th century, work force participation varied very little. Early industrialization did concentrate some women in factories but the majority of women remained in household settings, as family farm workers, shopkeepers and servants and the work force became increasingly divided and sex segregated.
Sources
Shows a group of women of varying ages working on pillow lace. They are working without machines in what could be a house as there is no obvious features that indicate factory work. Shows importance of women in the textile industry and how many of them remained to work without machinery in their homes to earn a living. Presence of child also suggests caring duties to children and how a woman’s role was primarily to be a mother and to work in ‘feminized’ industries such as the textile industry.
Shows a woman going to market with food to sell. Women were often merchants of food at markets and the emergence of capitalism saw a breakdown of the restrictions to women’s participation at market.