Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe

Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe PDF

Author: Anna Bellavitis

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-10-09

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 3319965417

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In the last decades, women’s role in the workforce has dramatically changed, though gender inequality persists and for women, gender identity still prevails over work identity. It is important not to forget or diminish the historical role of women in the labour market though and this book proposes a critical overview of the most recent historical research on women’s roles in economic urban activities. Covering a wide area of early modern Europe, from Portugal to Poland and from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, Bellavitis presents an overview of the economic rights of women – property, inheritance, management of their wealth, access to the guilds, access to education – and assesses the evolution of female work in different urban contexts.

Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe

Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe PDF

Author: Merry E. Wiesner

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2008-08-04

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 052187372X

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The third edition of Merry Wiesner-Hanks' prize-winning book incorporates the newest scholarship and features a new chapter on gender and race in the colonial world; expanded coverage of eighteenth century developments including the Enlightenment; and enhanced discussions of masculinity, single women, same-sex relations, humanism, and women's religious roles.

Apprenticeship, Work, Society in Early Modern Venice

Apprenticeship, Work, Society in Early Modern Venice PDF

Author: Anna Bellavitis

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-02-10

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 100083932X

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Apprenticeship in early modern Europe has been the subject of important research in the last decades, mostly by economic historians; but the majority of the research has dealt with cities or countries in Northern Europe. The organization, evolution and purpose of apprenticeship in Southern Europe are much less studied, especially for the early modern period. The research in this volume is based on a unique documentary source: more than 54,000 apprenticeship contracts registered from 1575 to 1772 by the "Old Justice", a civil court of the Republic of Venice in charge of guilds and labour disputes. An archival source of such scale provides a unique opportunity to historians, and this is the first time that primary research on apprenticeship is leveraging such a large amount of data in one of the main economic centres of early modern Europe. This book brings together multiple perspectives, including social history, economic history and art history, and is the outcome of an interdisciplinary collaboration between historians and computer scientists. Apprenticeship, Work, Society in Early Modern Venice will appeal to students and researchers alike interested in the nature of work and employment in Venice and Italy, as well as society in early modern Europe more generally.

Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe

Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe PDF

Author: Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-01-24

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 110875290X

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This fourth edition of Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks's prize-winning survey features significant changes to every chapter, designed to reflect the newest scholarship. Global issues have been threaded throughout the book, while still preserving the clear thematic structure of previous editions. Thus readers will find expanded discussions of gendered racial hierarchies, migration, missionaries, and consumer goods. In addition, there is enhanced coverage of recent theoretical directions; the ideas, beliefs, and practices of ordinary people; early industrialization; women's learning, letter writing, and artistic activities; emotions and sentiments; single women and same-sex relations; masculinities; mixed-race and enslaved women; and the life course from birth to death. With geographically broad coverage, including Russia, Scandinavia, the Ottoman Empire, and the Iberian Peninsula, this remains the leading text on women and gender in Europe in this period. Accompanying this essential reading is a completely revised website featuring extensive updated bibliographies, web links, and primary source material.

Female Agency in the Urban Economy

Female Agency in the Urban Economy PDF

Author: Deborah Simonton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-04-17

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1136275037

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This innovative new book is overtly and explicitly about female agency in eighteenth-century European towns. However, it positions female activity and decisions unequivocally in an urban world of institutions, laws, regulations, customs and ideologies. Gender politics complicated and shaped the day-to-day experiences of working women. Town rules and customs, as well as police and guilds’ regulations, affected women’s participation in the urban economy: most of the time, the formally recognized and legally accepted power of women – which is an essential component of female agency – was very limited. Yet these chapters draw attention to how women navigated these gendered terrains. As the book demonstrates, "exclusion" is too strong a word for the realities and pragmatism of women’s everyday lives. Frequently guild and corporate regulations were more about situating women and regulating their activities, rather than preventing them from operating in the urban economy. Similarly corporate structures, which were under stress, found flexible strategies to incorporate women who through their own initiative and activities put pressure on the systems. Women could benefit from the contradictions between moral and social unwritten norms and economic regulations, and could take advantage of the tolerance or complicity of urban authorities towards illicit practices. Women with a grasp of their rights and privileges could defend themselves and exploit legal systems with its loopholes and contradictions to achieve economic independence and power.

Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe

Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe PDF

Author: Merry E. Wiesner

Publisher:

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 9780521771054

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This is a major new edition of the most stimulating and authoritative textbook on early modern women currently available. Merry Wiesner has updated and expanded her prize-winning study; she summarises the very latest scholarship in her chapters and bibliographies, adding new sections on topics such as sexuality, masculinity, the impact of colonialism, and women's role as consumers. Other themes investigated include the female life-cycle, literacy, women's economic role, artistic creation, female piety - and witchcraft - and the relationship between gender and power. The clear and helpful structure of the first edition remains: it reflects the tripartite division of the self - mind, body, and spirit - traditional in western philosophy. Coverage is geographically broad; the second edition includes longer discussions of the border areas, such as Russia, Ireland, and the Iberian peninsula. Accessible, engrossing, and lively, this book will be of central importance for courses in gender history, early modern Europe, and comparative history.

The Whole Economy

The Whole Economy PDF

Author: Catriona Macleod

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-06-15

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 1009359339

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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.

The Routledge History of Women in Early Modern Europe

The Routledge History of Women in Early Modern Europe PDF

Author: Amanda L. Capern

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-06-30

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 9780367776732

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The Routledge History of Women in Early Modern Europe is a comprehensive and ground-breaking survey of the lives of women in early-modern Europe between 1450 and 1750. Covering a period of dramatic political and cultural change, the book challenges the current contours and chronologies of European history by observing them through the lens of female experience. The collaborative research of this book covers four themes: the affective world; practical knowledge for life; politics and religion; arts, science and humanities. These themes are interwoven through the chapters, which encompass all areas of women's lives: sexuality, emotions, health and wellbeing, educational attainment, litigation and the practical and leisured application of knowledge, skills and artistry from medicine to theology. The intellectual lives of women, through reading and writing, and their spirituality and engagement with the material world, are also explored. So too is the sheer energy of female work, including farming and manufacture, skilled craft and artwork, theatrical work and scientific enquiry. The Routledge History of Women in Early Modern Europe revises the chronological and ideological parameters of early-modern European history by opening the reader's eyes to an exciting age of female productivity, social engagement and political activism across European and transatlantic boundaries. It is essential reading for students and researchers of early-modern history, the history of women and gender studies.

What is Work?

What is Work? PDF

Author: Raffaella Sarti

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2018-09-21

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 1785339125

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Every society throughout history has defined what counts as work and what doesn’t. And more often than not, those lines of demarcation are inextricable from considerations of gender. What Is Work? offers a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding labor within the highly gendered realm of household economies. Drawing from scholarship on gender history, economic sociology, family history, civil law, and feminist economics, these essays explore the changing and often contested boundaries between what was and is considered work in different Euro-American contexts over several centuries, with an eye to the ambiguities and biases that have shaped mainstream conceptions of work across all social sectors.

A Cultural History of Marriage in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age

A Cultural History of Marriage in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age PDF

Author: Joanne M. Ferraro

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-11-18

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1350103187

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Why marry? The personal question is timeless. Yet the highly emotional desires of men and women during the period between 1450 and 1650 were also circumscribed by external forces that operated within a complex arena of sweeping economic, demographic, political, and religious changes. The period witnessed dramatic religious reforms in the Catholic confession and the introduction of multiple Protestant denominations; the advent of the printing press; European encounters and exchange with the Americas, North Africa, and southwestern and eastern Asia; the growth of state bureaucracies; and a resurgence of ecclesiastical authority in private life. These developments, together with social, religious, and cultural attitudes, including the constructed norms of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality, impinged upon the possibility of marrying. The nine scholars in this volume aim to provide a comprehensive picture of current research on the cultural history of marriage for the years between 1450 and 1650 by identifying both the ideal templates for nuptial unions in prescriptive writings and artistic representation and actual practices in the spheres of courtship and marriage rites, sexual relationships, the formation of family networks, marital dissolution, and the overriding choices of individuals over the structural and cultural constraints of the time. A Cultural History of Marriage in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age presents an overview of the period with essays on Courtship and Ritual; Religion, State and Law; Kinship and Social Networks; the Family Economy; Love and Sex; the Breaking of Vows; and Representations of Marriage.