Suchergebnisse

'Making a Living, Making a Difference' offers an eye-opening perspective on what men and women in early modern European society did all day. Based on an innovative method and a large data collection of everyday activities, the authors show the ways in which gender and work were linked in early modern society by revealing household, unpaid, and hidden, as well as paid, labour.

ABSTRACTBased on so-called Excise court records, this article argues that in eighteenth-century urban Sweden much of middling women's work took place in the interstices between households, as 'help' given to other women, often across social divides. These forms of work are often difficult to track in the historical records and, consequently, they have remained unnoticed, creating the erroneous picture that women did not contribute to their households through paid work. The lack of attention to these kinds of work has also overemphasized the closed character of early modern households which were, in fact, both flexible and permeable units.