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.

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.

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.

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.

This comparative study of the European history of apprenticeship offers a comprehensive picture of occupational training before the Industrial Revolution.

A pioneering text which covers the urban society of early modern Europe as a whole. Challenges the usual emphasis on regional diversity by stressing the extent to which cities across Europe shared a common urban civilization whose major features remained remarkably constant throughout the period. After outlining the physical, political, religious, economic and demographic parameters of urban life, the author vividly depicts the everyday routines of city life and shows how pitifully vulnerable city-dwellers were to disasters, epidemics, warfare and internal strife.

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.