2025/05/01 by Charmian Mansell · 1 voice
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Historical Economic and Social Studies
paper · doi:10.1215/15476715-11609909
openalex publication_date 2025/05/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
The Whole Economy: Work and Gender in Early Modern Europe, a collection of essays edited by Catriona Macleod, Alexandra Shepard, and Maria Ågren, is a much-needed corrective to male-centered histories of the early modern economy. The book makes no claim that this quest is entirely new. Since the early twentieth century, women’s role in the early modern economy has been reiterated time and again. Alice Clark and Ivy Pinchbeck pioneered studies of women’s work in Britain, and the mantle was later taken up by second-wave feminist scholars. As conversations around gender wage gaps, the value of unpaid work, and female labor opportunities have become regular features in contemporary public discourse, historians of gender and work have turned to parallel issues in the past.The book’s distinctiveness lies in the word whole in its title. The authors systematically challenge assumptions made by early modern economic historians about women’s contribution, placing the labor patterns of all members of early modern European society under the microscope. A recent history of Britain’s economic development between 1270 and 1870 claims that women could only have undertaken about 30 percent of paid work, while men contributed 70 percent. This proportion is based not only on the assumption that women must have done unpaid housework and childcare but also on the equally unfounded belief that this proportion remained static over six hundred years (20–21). The editors and contributors thoroughly interrogate such assumptions. The book comprises seven thematic chapters (on households, care, agriculture, rural manufactures, urban manufactures, migration, and war). Underpinning these contributions is an expansive understanding of work (long adopted by feminist economists) that captures various types of labor, and both paid and unpaid.Maria Ågren masterfully unpicks the home as a site of domestic activity, consumption, and production for men and women, and convincingly advocates for the two-supporter model of early modern households—that is, the joint economic contribution of married couples to their household economy. Ågren demonstrates that while men are typically identified by a single occupational descriptor (implying the elevated importance of their work above women’s, who were instead identified by marital status), household stability required mixed work repertoires, or pluriactivity, from both men and women.In measuring “progress,” Alexandra Shepard argues that we miss a huge subsistence service that allows progress to occur: care work. Economic activity cannot take place without somebody tending to the sick, the elderly, the young, and the vulnerable. Shepard argues that care should not be treated as something external to the economy; rather, it comprises “part of ‘capitalism’s economic subsystem (without which the market economy cannot function)’ and ‘a vital service within the paid economy’” (53). This chapter argues for integrating care work into the early modern economy by encouraging historians to chart geographical and chronological variation in the care burden and trace care work’s distribution across the “care diamond” (familial, commercial, state and voluntary services) and as paid and unpaid labor.In early modern Europe, most of the population lived in rural areas. Farmwork was the norm for both men and women. Jane Whittle and Hilde Sandvik point out underlying gender stereotypes in scholarship on agricultural work and use two detailed case studies to showcase regional variation in female agricultural labor. In coastal Norway, commercial fishing pulled men from their farms for much of the year, leaving wives to undertake all farming tasks, including managing livestock. In southwestern England, by contrast, where male migration was less typical, agricultural labor was divided sharply along gendered lines. In pastoral farming, women engaged in dairying, sheep shearing, and hay harvesting. They were never shepherds. Arable farming required female labor in weeding, sowing seeds and some field work, but men more regularly plowed and prepared land for growing crops.Proto-industry is one area in which women have received some scholarly attention. Growing demand for consumer goods is argued to have encouraged women’s participation in production, thereby sparking Jan de Vries’s “industrious revolution.” Carmen Sarasùa and Anna Bellavitis tackle women’s role in producing goods for market in two separate chapters, both of which offer correctives to de Vries’s thesis. Sarasùa argues that rural women’s textile work was not driven by local consumption but, rather, was export-oriented and comprised part of Europe’s expanding trade with colonies overseas. Bellavitis focuses on the various types of work urban women carried out as well as competition between men and women in the urban environment. The author draws out the apparent contradiction between the exclusion of women from city guilds and legal restrictions on their economic activity, and the evident need to carve out spaces for women’s work within the urban economy to keep society functioning.Amy Louise Erickson and Ariadne Schmidt, meanwhile, argue that gender is frequently missing from studies of the economic consequences of mobility and migration. Taking a comparative lens across Europe, they challenge the idea that women tended to carry out chain migration and traveled shorter distances than men. They show that most female migration was not carried out in search of service. Rather, women migrating to urban centers found work in a range of other occupations, including textile production and manufacturing. Erickson and Schmidt also destabilize the idea that women lacked agency in migration decisions: They did not simply respond to the occupational needs of their husbands or families. Rather, economic opportunities of their own prompted female migration.The collection’s final chapter turns its attention to war, a field where the economic activities of women are routinely overlooked. Margaret Hunt outlines two key points of historiography: the military revolution (in which army sizes grew enormously over the period); and the development of the fiscal military state (which saw state taxation pay for this expansion). Women rarely feature in these strands of scholarship; their economic role is relegated to providing domestic and sexual services to military personnel. Hunt, however, sets out an agenda for early modern historians of war to bring gender into the fray, pointing out that “there is a tendency to write histories of work (both men’s and women’s work) as if our subjects lived lives relatively uninterrupted by natural or human-made disaster” (213). Hunt asks two crucial questions: How did local economies manage resource depletion, and how did war affect gendered patterns of labor?It is beyond the scope of the book to consider how far gendered work practices mapped onto colonial economies, but many chapters nonetheless drew their studies outward to think about growing European trade with and exploitation of colonies. The strength of this volume lies in the geographical and chronological tests of gendered assumptions about the functioning of the early modern economy. This volume persuasively demonstrates that male-dominated economic histories—despite their claims of being definitive—are partial at best. Understanding the “whole” economy requires not simply adding women in but also asking different questions. The volume showcases myriad sources and approaches for how researchers might recast traditional ways of approaching past economies.