Preliminary Programme

This paper is part of a larger project that looks at the growth of state administration in early modern Sweden and its effects upon the gender division of work, both in terms of gender ideology and in terms of women’s and men’s job opportunities and their experiences of working life. This larger project (which will become a monograph, hopefully) in its turn forms part of the even larger project “Gender and Work in early modern Sweden” currently conducted at the department of history at Uppsala university (www.gaw.hist.uu.se) and funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.
Based on manuscript sources (court records, probate inventories, petitions, etc.) and on previous research, the paper identifies the ways in which wife, children and servants could contribute to the household economy (or marital economy) of lower civil servants in early modern Sweden. In one way, wives “helping out” were inconceivable since the husband/civil servant was bound by oath to carry out his work on his own and with individual responsibility. On the other hand, the complex situation of civil servants often made it necessary for them to rely on various forms of support from household members. An introductory quotation from Weber provides the point of departure, pointing out that what is today thought of as 'rational bureaucracy' is the result of a protracted historical process. I am interested in whether and how this process affected gender relations.
Women could, in principle, be lower civil servants with letters of attorney of their own; there are at least some examples of this from seventeenth-century Sweden. Women could also 'inherit' the position as civil servant from their husbands; in these cases, the women might never have been appointed in the first place but the state accepted that they remained on duty until someone else (like a son) was available. As wives, finally, women could take part in the work of their husbands (the civil servants proper); this was probably the most common case but also the one about which we know least. Consequently, my paper is almost entirely devoted to this case. (Show less)

It has often been argued that it was more common in northern than in southern Europe for children to leave home at an early age and that this custom was a contributing factor in the development of the precocious individualism found in the north of Europe. In reality, the evidence assembled by recent studies invalidates this hypothesis and suggests that this clear-cut geographical difference did not exist. The paper will examine in particular the case of Venice, with specific attention to wages in relation to gender. (Show less)

Agriculture in France is dominated by family businesses. In Cognac, farm property, wine grower and entrepreneurial skills, as well as the status of company head, are transmitted in most cases to male heirs. Female heirs can operate a family business in exceptional conditions, especially when there is no male in the kinship group. In this paper, I would like to outline two non-symetrical situations :

First of all, in ordinary cases, a male heir leads the family business and his female partner gets a job outside of the farm. These women consider wage earning as the condition of their material freedom. They value to have a professional activity of their own, distinct from that of their partners, their in-laws and the family business. They are determined not to reproduce the condition of their mothers-in-law, i.e. helpmate in the farm, whom they see as simply supplying free labor for the service of the family. However, depending on the social position of the protagonists, their income supports to a certain extent the family business. In this respect, male farmers encourage their partner to keep this kind of job.

Second of all, women who lead a wine-growing business in Cognac are still exceptional. However, in the space of one generation, women’s condition has been transformed : they now refuse to be only helpmates (without a professional status), they have diplomas (more than male farmers) and want to become active farmers by themselves. In this paper, I will show that the place of their male partner is one of the main difficulties that they meet in their training and installation in the family business. Should their partners have a professional activity inside or outside the family farm ? Both solutions are problematic. If the male partner favors his own career outside the family business, he may divert his partner from the farm, whereas if he stays in the family business he may be suspected by his in-laws of taking advantage of his wife’s situation, and may put the family business situation in danger in case of divorce. (Show less)

Except for the very specific case of English parish apprentices, apprenticeship during the industrial revolution has rarely been studied, contrary both to its early modern and 21st-century forms. The volume of 19th-century studies by contemporaries complaining about a "crisis" of apprenticeship (as in any other period...) is not matched by that of historical studies of practices. We thus do not know much about the period when a model of family-like, unpaid apprenticeship in small shops or workshops (that was the ideal, if not the main practice) was at some point replaced by something similar to a labor contract, with specific provisions and a tie to schools, but with wages and no necessary reference to the family or small firm.
The case of mid-19th-century modern France is therefore very interesting. On the one hand, apprenticeship survived there, especially but not only in the fashion and luxury trades that were crucial to French exports, and was regulated in 1851 by a law that ostensibly tried to maintain its traditional features (by comparing the behavior of a good master to that of a father, by implicitly equating the master with the head of a small firm, etc.). On the other hand, France had forbidden guilds in 1791, thus forcing the old system to change, and as the country industrialized, apprenticeship came to be used in large manufactures, which blurred its borders with child labor. For Paris specifically, practices and regulations of apprenticeship in both small and large firms can be studied thanks to rich and diverse sources falling in three main categories: detailed statistics allowing to understand what was included under the umbrella term "apprenticeship" in each trade and how "apprentices" fitted in the division of labor in small and in larger firms; judicial records of hundreds of cases exposing both precise instances of the use of "apprenticeship" in the new industrial contexts and attempts by the special judges (prud'hommes, who were themselves skilled workers or masters) to preserve the traditional, family-like model; debates on the 1851 law and its implementation and attempts by unofficial trade associations to complement it by commonly agreed guidelines, shedding light on implicit conflicting models of apprenticeship.
In line with the main topics on the panel, I will use these sources to focus on the following questions and on the degree of change that the industrial revolution brought to them: Was apprenticeship "unpaid labor"? How was it connected with family work, e.g. family being a model for apprenticeship and apprentices being used as substitutes for the work of family children? How did gender (the apprentice's, but also the master's gender) interfer with this question? Was apprenticeship considered as a contract by the actors, and who was a party to this contract: the master and the apprentice, but also the master's firm, the apprentice's family, and/or a guild, an association, a religious community, etc.? (Show less)

In the second half of the 20th century France is a country where small enterprise is stubborn and, like other south European states, a country were family business is still persistent. This is a matter of fact in small as well in medium and big size enterprises and constitute, according to some main-stream - at least until the petrol crises of mid-70s - analysis, one of the questionable characters of its modernization. One of the reasons claimed to explain the small family business resilience during the crises has been the importance of gracious contribution of kin to the market production of artisanal family enterprises.
Unpaid labour of family members in a range of artisanal and commercial family business, and particularly spouses’, sons’ and daughters’ work, is a way to contribute both to the performance of the enterprise and to the wellbeing of the family testified in a multitude of sources (surveys, proceedings, oral and written memories, trade associations’ archives), even if statistically undocumented. Besides, the country whose social rights are considered among the most advanced in the world, has been extremely slow in defining the legal status of these family workers. This was the case not only for siblings, parents or children but even for husbands and wives, who formed the majority of these workers. A law defining the procedure, still optional, of a notification of this unpaid work and of social security benefits owed to marital partners assisting entrepreneurs, without been their associate or having a wage, has been voted only in 1982. Although civil and professional courts have been constantly appealed to judging at wives’ and husbands’ urgent entreaties, especially when they were divorcing, all along the 20th but even in the previous century, a legal frame for this workers has been lacking until very recent years. This paper deal with the process which lead to a new definition of the border, historically changing, between the duty of assisting and mutual help inherent to marriage and a work exceeding this moral and legal obligation and creating the right to be compensated by a remuneration. In order to understand this recent and tortuous evolution of occupational right, two historical enquiries are necessary. On one side it is important to study the reasons of the changing position of trade associations on this issue and, on the other hand, the influence of lasting familial institutions as marital and paternal authority on the formal and informal rules regulating artisan business. (Show less)