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"Using innovative digital humanities research yoked to a specially-built database of sources, Making a Living, Making a Difference revises many received opinions about the history of gender and work in Europe through analysis of the micro-patterns of early modern life."--Back cover.
It is well-known that gender distinctions structure the modern labour market, but why is this so and how far back in time does the pattern extend? Gender, Work, and the Transition to Modernity in Northwestern Europe, 1720-1880 uses a unique method to map and explain how gender rather than marital status came to be important. Gender, Work, and the Transition to Modernity in Northwestern Europe, 1720-1880 investigates how and why the division of work between men and women changed in the transition from early modern to modern society. Based on the verb-oriented method and around 19,000 observations of work activities in historical sources, its focus is on a mid-Swedish local society in the peri...
Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, women's role in the Swedish economy was renegotiated and reconceptualized. Maria Agren chronicles changes in married women's property rights, revealing the story of Swedish women's property as not just a s
The Title of this Book has a Double meaning: on the one hand, it deals with two very different societies both of which made iron in the early modern period. On the other hand, iron made these societies; the needs of iron production and the resistance to these demands from local peasant communities gave them a special kind of cohesion and rationality. This volume presents the findings of a joint team of Swedish and Russian scholars examining the social organisation of work in early modern iron industry in their respective societies. It examines actual production processes, the organisation of work, social conflict, questions of ownership and its evolution, as well as the diffusion and organisation of technical knowledge.
Advocating a gender-inclusive approach to the history of work, this book both counts and accounts for women's as well as men's economic activity. Showcasing novel conceptual, methodological and empirical perspectives, it highlights the transformative potential of including women's work in wider assessments of continuity and change in economic performance. Focusing on the period of European history (1500-1800) that generated unprecedented growth in the northwest – which, in turn, was linked to the global redistribution of resources and upon which industrialisation depended – the book spans key arenas in which women produced change: households, care, agriculture, rural manufacture, urban markets, migration, and war. The analysis refutes the stubborn contention of mainstream economic history that we can generalise about economic performance by focusing solely on the work of adult men and demonstrates that women were active agents in the early modern economy rather than passively affected by changes wrought upon them.
London became an international center for import and export trade in the late Middle Ages. The export of wool, the development of luxury crafts and the redistribution of goods from the continent made London one of the leading commercial cities of Europe. While capital for these ventures came from a variety of sources, the recirculation of wealth through London women was important in providing both material and social capital for the growth of London's economy. A shrewd Venetian visiting England around 1500 commented about the concentration of wealth and property in women's hands. He reported that London law divided a testator's property three ways allowing a third to the wife for her life us...
This book focuses on early examples of women who may be said to have anticipated, in one way or another, modern professional and/or career-oriented women. The contributors to the book discuss women who may at least in some respect be seen as professionally ambitious, unlike the great majority of working women in the past. In order to improve their positions or to find better business opportunities, the women discussed in this book invested in developing their qualifications and professional skills, took economic or other kinds of risks, or moved to other countries. Socially, they range from elite women to women of middle-class and lower middle-class origin. In terms of theory, the book brings fresh insights into issues that have been long discussed in the field of women’s history and are also debated today. However, despite its focus on women, the book is conceptually not so much focused on gender as it is on profession, business, career, qualifications, skills, and work. By applying such concepts to analyzing women’s endeavours, the book aims at challenging the conventional ideas about them.
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This collection of essays looks at the various ways in which women have coped financially in a male-dominated world. Chapters focus on Europe and Latin America, and cover the whole of the modern period.
Swedish medieval marriage formation was a process, written down in the secular laws. However, it started to evolve because of the interaction with the medieval Catholic marriage doctrine, which focused on mutual words of consent. Although first the canon law of marriage, and then Lutheran marriage dogma influenced the Swedish development, the perception of marriage as a process, consisting of several legal acts and accompanied by property transfers, proved remarkably resilient. The pragmatic and rural character of Sweden contributed to this, despite pressure from canon and Roman law and attempts at bringing marriage formation under ecclesiastical control. Marrying by stages was in itself unremarkable in Europe, but the legal foundation and formality make medieval and sixteenth-century Sweden a unique case study.