Preliminary Programme

The title of my paper takes up a passage in which a character from the book by Moderata Fonte The Worth of Women: Wherein is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men (Venice, 1600) enumerates all the negative aspects of marriage for a woman. A significant number of studies have been devoted in recent years to the economic and proprietary rights of women in the societies of early modern Europe. But it has not always been easy to bring together economic history and the history of law, particularly with regard to the various European legal traditions. To what extent did the Italian legal system limit the possibilities for women - single, married or widowed - to participate actively in economic life? What were the consequences of the Protestant Reform on the rights of single women? What were the actual limits of apparently very constricting systems, such as the English 'coverture'? In my paper I will present a European overview and I will propose new hypotheses on the basis of research on the case of Venice in the early modern age. (Show less)

This presentation examines the role of women in artisanal firms in early modern Paris, arguing that female labor, and particularly that provided by the master’s family, was indispensable for business success. Wives, whose work in artisanal enterprises has not been extensively studied, performed the entire range of tasks necessary to keep their family businesses running. While wives’ manual labor in shops, performing production tasks, was important, perhaps more crucial was the managerial work they did. Particularly in retail-focused enterprises, women provided the public face of the business, working with customers, handling money and as such they played key roles in the profitability of the business. Further, the reproductive labor that wives contributed, birthing children and managing a productive household, has been largely invisible. In these multiple ways, women contributed to business success in ways that have not been fully explored. In my comments, I will focus on several luxury trades, in particular goldsmiths and jewelers, to show the ways women worked in these industries. Using guild statutes, archival records and secondary sources, I will explore the range of women’s work in retail artisanal shops. (Show less)

Daniel Defoe argued that ‘I would have every tradesman make his wife so much acquainted with his trade, and so much mistress of the managing part of it, that she might be able to carry it on if she pleased, in case of his death; … [or so ] she may have the satisfaction of preserving the father's trade for the benefit of his son.’ While business and enterprise were increasingly construed as a male province during the eighteenth century, the records are peppered with women engaged in a range of entrepreneurial practices. Some were retail businesses, while others had roots in artisanal trades, like the printing trades. In the artisanal world, guilds had a central role in managing the urban economy and ‘gatekeeping’ to ensure that untrained and ‘unskilled’ men did not enter the craft. It goes almost without saying that women were considered ‘untrained’ by these guildsmen.
Printing trades offer a different view of the urban artisanal community. They cover a wide spectrum encompassing booksellers, bookbinders, printers, papermakers, newsvendors, paper merchants, etc. Throughout the trades there was a strong and recognised presence of women, and evidence of independent decision making by wives and widows. However important issues of skill, division of labour, and the use of technology shaped the context in which these women worked. Printing relied particularly on machinery identified with men and male strength: specifically the printing press and thus the trade itself was profoundly gendered in that men were seen as pulling the press. Across Europe, commercial artisanal activities clearly embraced a longstanding endemic system of labour. At first sight this division of labour had technological distinctions at its heart in that men operated larger and more complex machinery, like the printing press. However, the tools themselves were not necessarily the cause of the division of tasks and roles, but frequently the result, and often not division of labour but gendered distinctions about tools, training and skills shaped the workplace.
My point of departure is the operation of gender in commercial and artisanal towns of late 18th century Europe. This paper looks specifically at printing and the gendered issues around this area of work which became increasingly important in a world where literacy and the press were growing aspects of the urban world. Printing bridged the world of artisanal culture and the emerging ‘modern’ entrepreneurial fields and reflected many of the issues of skill and exclusion that were embedded in artisanal trades and professions with implications for training and access. Therefore, this paper reflects on training, ‘gendering’ the tools, but also gendering the workspace so that the tools became part of a larger complex of what was seen as man’s place and woman’s place in these communities. It contests the idea that women were only tangentially involved with the printing trades and situates them firmly in the profession as significant players. (Show less)