Preliminary Programme

The topic of this paper will be women’s wages in the south-west of England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It will examine evidence that has been gathered from household account books of the period from Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Wiltshire, Dorset and Hampshire for the purpose of doctoral research into women’s work in early modern England, part of a wider Leverhulme funded project at the University of Exeter led by Professor Jane Whittle. Different households will be compared and contrasted in order to construct a wider picture of working women and wages, answering questions such as which jobs were more profitable for women to undertake, whether demographic factors such as age, marital status and motherhood affected women’s earnings and the extent of the existence of a ‘gender pay gap’ in early modern England. This topic will attract a wider audience beyond those interested in the early modern era, as the issues of gender and wages are still ongoing and can be applied to all historical periods. Issues and questions will be raised that are still relevant to the study of women’s work today. (Show less)

The city of Münster was one of centres for producing and distributing linen in Westphalia that was well konwn for its linens. The textiles were produced within and around the city which also provided a market place for different form of distribution. Until early seventeenth century weaving linen was a common practice and even when a group of specialised weavers organised itself in a brotherhood the production of common linen was explicitly open to everyone, women and men. While the relevance of the linen trades is obvious, it remains difficult to find out detailed information on the persons that were actually producing linen. Although commissioned work seems to have been quite common, it probably was never documented in written contracts. Hence data on the remuneration of work remains scarce. It also has to be considered that the producers of linens had the status of independent artisans or were producing on the side line on the country side and did not receive wages as wage labourers. Therefore the prices of linens that were sold by producers also can be taken as indicators for the remuneration of work. In Münster the administration of the poor relief foundations of the Dome was continuously buying single pieces of linen by many sellers. It seems that these linen were bought on the urban market and the transactions were documented in the account books of the administration. Between 1576 and 1646 533 transactions were documented and about 70 percent of the sellers were female. The data will be analysed in respect of indications for differences of the prices generated by gender. The findings will complemented with some single entries in the accounts of the lepers’ hospital for the commissioned production of linens by women from late sixteenth century. These entries give some indication how the production of linens was calculated and how the work was remunerated. On this basis the paper will provide some insights in the remuneration of female labour. (Show less)

In Lyon, at the end of the eighteenth century women formed a major part of the workforce. The silk industry (Grande Fabrique) employed up to 35,000 workers in 1788 and relied heavily on female labour, despite the fact that women’s right to work was regularly challenged by urban guilds (Garden, 1970; Cayez, 1978; Juratic and Pellegrin, 1994; Hafter, 1995 and 2007). While the spouses and daughters of masters, who numbered around 4,000 at the end of the eighteenth century, had special privileges allowing them to weave outside of family workshops, up to 19,000 ancillary workers – women and children carrying out most of the other tasks – were underpaid to do exhausting work. As D. Hafter notes, ‘all our statistics about eighteenth- century employment in Lyon are skewed by the deficiencies in our knowledge of women’s production and wages’ (Hafter, 1995: 46). Thus there is still considerable work to be done in order to reconstruct the gender characteristics of wage forms and wage systems in early modern textile manufacturing. From this perspective, this paper will concentrate on massive but still underexploited sources, namely the Lyon guild records of infringements which offer a vast array of small-scale wage conflicts. These 53 volumes for the 114-year period 1667-1781 will help us to highlight the various forms of wage-payment which, according to M. Sonenscher, ‘owed more to the bazaar economy of the trades than to the prescription of the law’ (Sonenscher, 1989: 174), and their evolution during the long eighteenth century. In order to understand better this ‘face to face economy’, embedded in social and gender norms, and to shed light on the gender-based asymmetry of wage systems, a particular attention will be paid to the precise nature of the work that was undertaken, to the impact of negotiation on wage and tariffs formation, and to the agency that both male and female workers of various familial and professional positions could develop – or not – in the labour market. (Show less)