Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe

Dados Bibliográficos

ID8048679
AutoresBarbara A Hanawalt (autor correspondente)
Ano2023
Data de publicação2023-05-18
Open AccessSim
TipoBOOK
PeriódicoWomen and Work in Preindustrial Europe (SOURCE_BOOK)
EditoraIndiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2979/womenandworkinpreind
OpenAlexW4377038061
ISBN9780253069146
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas7
Referências citadas32

public one of the manor.One might take the excellent studies that have been done of early modern and modern peasant women3 and cast their picture back into earlier centuries, but the early modern economy was different in many ways from the medieval one.Women in early modern Europe had many more opportunities to engage in cottage industry or to sell their labor in the rapidly expanding cities.The economy of the thir teenth through mid-fifteenth centuries in England was still largely centered on the exploitation of individual holdings on manors.Manorial records do contribute something to our knowledge of women's work.More information can be gleaned from wills, poll tax returns, and coroners' inquests.These last provide a vignette of people's activities in the last few hours of their lives before they died a sudden death by homicide or accident.They are rich in details about the daily routine of peasants and give the reader a sense of being at the scene.Most rural women would eventually marry, because they had so few options for employment outside the household economy.Peasant women would not become nuns, and the position of servant was usually a temporary one limited to the teenage years of the life cycle.The other possibilities for unmarried peasant girls were not entirely attractive.They could stay at a brother's home and work for his family; they could hope to find work in an urban center or on a manor as a servant; or they could become prostitutes.J. C. Russell's work on the 1377 poll tax showed that in villages with a population of 1 to 800, 75 percent of the women were married.This percentage tended to decrease in boroughs.The figure represents all women over fourteen years of age (the taxable age) but does not indicate widows or those who would eventually be married.4Determining the number of men and women who remained single is particularly difficult, even with demo graphic models.Wrigley and Schofield, however, estimated that only about 7 percent of the population in the mid-sixteenth century never married.Thus the number of permanently celibate woman was very low.5A woman's first contribution to the household economy, therefore, was the money, goods, animals, or land that she brought to the marriage in her dowry, dower from a former husband, or inheritance in her own right.These possessions came from a variety of sources, but wills give the most detailed information.One must remember, however, that they are a biased source since they tend to overrepresent the wealthier elements in the com munity.The vast majority of wills were left by men so that women appear as beneficiaries of husbands, fathers, grandfathers, godfathers, and masters.A father dying without a son could provide in his will for his daughter or daughters to inherit his property.In the customary law of most manors and in common law, the inheritance would be divided equally among the sur viving daughters.The will gave a man of property an opportunity to divide

Geography · Work (physics) · Engineering · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Mechanical Engineering