Pre-session of the WEHC (Boston, August 2018)

Barcelona 28^th June

“Seminario de la sección de Historia Contemporánea del Departamento de Historia y Arqueología”

Financial support from the university of Barcelona, the ANR Programme Time-Us and the LARHRA-UMR 5190

Organizers: Cristina Borderías and Manuela Martini

Recent economic historiography completely reframed the narrative of the macroeconomic causes of crises. By reducing significantly the weight of agrarian crises and reinforcing that of financial and commercial crises, it allows us to understand the crises of the second half of the eighteenth century in line with those of the following century.  Instead, the impact of crises at the micro analytical scale is much less known, as well as its consequences at the household economy level, the dominant production units throughout the period considered here in most of the regions of Mediterranean Europe and Central and South America we would like to compare. Sharing the idea of a connection between crises and the different waves of globalization, the aim of this panel is to compare the effects of crises in regions with different levels of industrialization and to focus on the local institutional responses and the families’ adaptive strategies face to a radical change in their economic environment. If we consider the crisis not as a simple reversal of the economic cycle, but as a moment of systemic change, where the economic assets are redefined by the social actors due to the impossibility for them to consider satisfactory the normal compensation mechanisms and the usual forms of redistribution operative within a given economic and social system, the importance of a micro-analytical approach in the study of this phenomenon becomes evident. In this perspective, the whole range of the economic actors’ reactions is at the core of the analysis, including the ability to cope with changes by those who are at the bottom of the social ladder. Feminist economists and development economists have insisted more recently, in this respect, on the differential effects of economic crises on gender relations. This change of perspective in observing the consequences of crisis helps to pay a renewed attention to the inner workings of household based economies and to the families’ ability to adapt to economic and systemic changes. What is the impact of these crises on localized household economies? How do their dynamics contribute to construct, and deconstruct, the labor relations around them? In what way the social dynamic they create affects the relationships between men and women in the labor market on one side, and within the families on the other? The purpose of this special issue is to observe in a historical perspective how these socioeconomic mechanisms work in particular economic and social contexts. It deals in a long-term perspective with the (proto)industrial production crises of the second half of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries related to the globalization of trades and exchanges. But it also aims at studying the micro-systemic crises affecting specifically – because of changes in technology, energy sources, communication routes, etc. – economies and local labor market. The participation as discussants of scholars who specialize on other industrial regions, Asia, Northern Europe or North America, will address these issues in a global perspective.

Organizers of the session in Boston: Cristina Borderías (University of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain), Aurora Gómez Galvarriato (Department of History, El Colegio de México, Mexico), Manuela Martini (University of Lyon 2 Lumière, France),

Programme

9.15 Openning: Manuela Martini and Cristina Borderías

9.30-10.45.- Llorenç Ferrer, Angels Solà y Lluis Viros (University of Barcelona), Adaptive strategies and the transformation of silk production and producers of Catalonia, 1790-1860 (Barcelona and Manresa).

Chair: Manuela Martini

 Abstract: In eighteenth-century Catalonia, silk manufacture, which was comprised of different sub-sectors, grew strongly in some populations.  The three great silk centres were Barcelona, Manresa, and Reus.  In Barcelona, the Guilds of the Great Art of Silk produced luxury and high-quality textiles while those of Manresa would specialise in the production of low-quality handkerchiefs and in narrow strips of ribbon that were exported massively to America and the rest of the Peninsula. Production was organised in guilds with organisational flexibility and an ability to adapt to the needs of the markets that varied from one population to another.  Some activities would allow a very important accumulation of capital, above all, in Manresa. The maritime wars at the end of the eighteenth century, and later the War of Spanish Independence (known locally as “la guerra del Francès”, or, the War of the French) and the loss of the majority of the colonial market (1808-1823) would provoke a profound crisis in silk production, above all in some populations, in which they had to deal with the hundreds of people that lived from these activities.  This would have repercussions of which we still know almost nothing.  This would give rise to the migration of businessmen and qualified labour to those nuclei that maintained activity or that developed similar activities, like cotton processing, as well as the adaption of new market opportunities in similar economic sectors (the elaboration of cotton knit-work or fabrics of silk blended with other fibres) in their place of origin. In Manresa, everything seems to indicate that the silk activity was practically abandoned.  Some master silk-weavers (velers) were displaced to Barcelona, where they would continue the activity; whereas others invested in the cotton industry, especially in the ribbon industry, which would prove to be highly profitable.  Likewise, some silk-weavers would become weavers of blended fabrics, surely taking advantage of the experience garnered as silk-weavers.  During the second-half of the nineteenth century, these weavers would disappear and we are ignorant of their destiny. In Barcelona, the production of silk textiles was maintained.  The silk-weavers’ guild would continue to restrict the hiring of apprentices and the concession of mastership before a notary beyond the definitive abolition of labour corporations, until the end of the 1840s.  In this continuity, the arrival of numerous master silk-weavers from Manresa who joined the Barcelona guild in the 1820s was noteworthy.  Steam-powered machinery and the confection of cloth with modern frames were introduced in the 1840s.  The survival and modernisation of the silk sector, together with the development of cotton spinning and weaving, would continue to attract artisan and manufacturers from Manresa who would enter the Barcelona textile industry.  It is necessary to underscore that the majority of silk-weaver apprentices in Barcelona of 1815-1840 would not become manufacturers in the silk sector, but in that of cotton. The objective of this communication is to analyse how, from two different trajectories and experiences, the guilds of Barcelona and Manresa adapted and were transformed after the silk manufacturing crisis at the end of the eighteenth century, based on the evaluation of the general data of the tax-contributors of the sector and the tracking of individual trajectories. The documents used in this investigation are from guild archives, the residence registries, industrial tax contributions, and the notary acts of Manresa and Barcelona.

11-12.30.  Lina Gálvez, Paula Rodriguez-Modroño, Mauricio Matus-López (Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Sevilla),  A historical and gender analysis of economic crises in Europe. From the 1970s crisis to the Great Recession. 

Chair: Anne Montenach

 Abstract: This work presents a comparative analysis of the gender impacts of economic crises affecting the European Union (EU-15) in the last century. Research on economic crises from a gender perspective shows three main historical patterns. The first pattern is that crises result in an intensification of women’s total work, particularly unpaid care work. The second one is that male employment always recovers previous to female employment in the aftermath of the crisis. The third pattern is that crises lead to setbacks in gender equality in terms of legislation, gender norms, and policies. Based on EU data, this study compares the Great Recession with previous European economic crises and recessionary periods in order to detect similarities and differences in gender inequalities and the gender division of work, since the Great Recession might have modified some of these patterns. The analysis specially focuses on the second pattern, by comparing the different time lapse in the recovery of male and female employment through a set of indicators that allow to cover different aspects in the quantity and quality of work for women and men.

12.30-13.30 Lunch

13.30-15.30 Anne Montenach (Université Aix-en-Provence), Coping with economic uncertainty and gender inequality: women, work and the protoindustrial family in eighteenth-century Lyon.

Chair: Juanjo Romero

Abstract: In the eighteenth century Lyon was the second-largest city in France with a population that had grown from 100,000 to nearly 150,000 between the early eighteenth century and the end of the Old Regime. The textile sector, the city’s largest industrial sector, was dominated by the silk industry (Grande Fabrique), which employed up to 35,000 workers in 1788. Between the 1740s and the 1780s, the Grande Fabrique labour structure evolved into a large capitalist export industry, with master weavers becoming proletarianized labourers dominated by large-scale merchants. Moreover, during the last decade of the Old Regime, the silk industry began a serious decline, which made silk workers’ lives became increasingly miserable and led to periodical wage disputes (Garden, 1970). Women’s voices and experiences hardly appear within this grand narrative, whereas their work was crucial for silk production in Lyon. In fact, the Grande Fabrique increased its female workforce tenfold during the eighteenth century (Bayard et al., 2007) and relied heavily on female labour, despite the fact that women’s right to work was regularly challenged by urban guilds (Garden, 1970; Cayez, 1978; Juratic and Pellegrin, 1994; Hafter, 1995 and 2007). While the spouses and daughters of masters, who numbered around 4,000 at the end of the eighteenth century, had special privileges allowing them to weave outside of family workshops, up to 19,000 ancillary workers – women and children carrying out most of the other tasks – were underpaid to do exhausting work. The aim of this article is thus to analyse how female working conditions and remunerations were affected by the structural and economic crises that impacted Lyon silk industry in the second half of the eighteenth century. It will concentrate, at a micro level, on different circumstances in which sources allow us to see women – and their families – coping with economic uncertainty: small-scale wage conflicts with their employers (male or female), clandestine work and illicit activities. In discussing these developments, this essay will study how women’s work was a real issue in power conflicts – which can be analysed at different levels – and a tool for household adaptive strategies, allowing the development of gendered interactions within the couple and the family.

16.00-17.30 Francesca Sanna (Paris Diderot University), Rationalizing the family: actions and reactions to scientific management in Nord-European and Mediterranean mining communities during the interwar crisis.

Chair: Paula Rodriguez

Abstract: The inter-war period marked a crisis for mining industry, following the consequences of Black Thursday, but also the fluctuation of mineral stock prices on the London stock market exchange. At the same time, the inter-war period also represents a “transition”, from a technical and technological point of view, for the extractive industry. The two phenomena are linked one another in many ways, the most obvious of which is the acceleration of rationalization practices in order to face the challenges of the new performances’ standards. However, rationalization had also a more global scope, going beyond the technique to become a sort philosophical principle. So the idea of ​​total and scientific control of the productive structure and the workers was sometimes transferred to social life in order to optimize performance through the disciplinization of the private sphere. Rationalization, conceived as the scientific management of the workforce, became the new core of the paternalistic practices. Thus family represented the privileged terrain for these practices, in order to reformulate its economy and organization. In relation to mining environment, as the technical change went along with a permanence of old habits, thus the maintenance of certain uses or traditions demonstrates the actors’ resistance or the search for alternative ways to the new model. To this extent we can consider these permanencies as forms of adaptive family’s economy in mining environment, where communities were often organized in company towns under the strict control of the Companies. Through some case studies on Mediterranean mining in Southern Europe and in Northern France, this contribution aims to shed light on some practices of adaptive family’s economy facing rationalization and mining crisis.

Other papers that will be presented at Boston conference.

Chairs, Cristina Borderías&Manuela Martini:

Ida Fazio, (Università degli studi di Palermo), Women and men in illicit trades between the Kingdom of Sicily and the Kingdom of Naples during the commercial crisis of the Continental Blockade and the Napoleonic wars (Stromboli, 1808-1816)

 Abstract: The period of the Napoleonic wars is universally regarded as a period of commercial crisis due to the Continental Blockade established by Napoleon forbidding his allies and conquests and all neutral shipping from trading with the United Kingdom and her allies. Historians debate whether corsairing and smuggling were forms of reaction to the blockade, or different ways to   go on with trading. Illicit trades between the Bourbon Kingdom of Sicily (a British protectorate) and the Napoleonic Kingdom of Naples during the Continental Blockade are crucial in the current debate on the crisis of Mediterranean trade during the Napoleonic Wars. The paper aims to shed some light on the impact of this crisis on family economies using a micro-historical approach, focusing on women and men involved in salt smuggling between the Kingdom of Sicily and the Kingdom of Naples, and in fraudulent sales of prizes of the Bourbon corsairs. These illicit trades show some overlaps and differences between the roles of women and men, as they were carried out together by islanders, local custom officers and the border health inspectors, and led to inquiries on the part of the Government and of the Prize Court of the Kingdom of Sicily, who judged whether prizes had been lawfully captured  and ordered the sale of the goods seized by the privateers sailing on behalf of the Bourbon Monarchy. The paper explores the different ways couples, families and individuals were involved in networks, bargains and complicities with corsairs and local officers.

Aurora Gómez Galvarriato (El Colegio de México), Technological change in corn tortilla production and its impact on Mexican women labor.

Abstract. Until the end of the 19th century the production of corn tortillas, the main food staple of Mexicans, was carried out through rudimentary methods. The delayed technological change in its production meant a greater share of women’s labor used for the production of food than in other parts of the world that consumed other grains, such as wheat. The mechanization of the production of tortillas started in the larger cities, at the beginning of the 20th century in the grinding of the nixtamal The analysis of the nixtamal mills and the tortilla shops in Mexico City in 1924 shows that as the production process mechanized and incorporated new technologies, it became increasingly controlled by men both in terms of its property and of its labor. Moreover, the wage-gap between male and female workers and the concentration of its property increased.

Keywords: mechanization, masculinization, corn tortillas, nixtamal, female labor.

Cirila Quintero (El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Campus Matamoros, Mexico), Coping with Continuous Crises in Maquiladoras. The Case of Mexican Women Workers.

Abstract:  This paper points out how the evolution of assembling companies in Mexico (named Maquiladoras) during little more than fifty years has been very irregular, coping with contestant crises. These crises have affected women workers in this industry. Due to these crises, women in maquiladoras have learnt different strategies of surviving in difficult times.  This paper distinguishes three very critical moments and their effects in women workers: first, the modernization of maquiladoras in the eighties; second, the years of the NAFTA, from 1995 to 2000, and finally, the automobile crises, from 2009 to 2010. In these three stages, hundreds of women lost their jobs. This paper look for knowing what happened with these women after being fired. Different questions should be solved: Did they come back to the maquiladora?, Did they returned  to home?  Were they hired in other sectors? Besides these labor questions, the paper studies how the dismissal affected women´s home?, and if these women´s relationship with member of their family changed. The objective of this paper is to know if the strategies used are similar or different in the different stages of the maquiladora evolution, how the micro, meso and macro-economic and social level are connected with female workers in the labor market, and how the strategies used by these women weakened or strengthened their social and domestic role. The paper is based on interviews with women workers in the different stages of crises in two of the most important maquiladora cities: Ciudad Juárez and Matamoros. The information is complete with the revision of news from local newspaper in each period.

Key words: mechanization, maquilas, female labour, masculinization, feminization

Mario Matus  González y Nora Reyes C. (Universidad de Chile) Impacto de las crisis externas en los salarios chilenos entre 1886 y 2009” (Impact of external crises on Chilean salaries between 1886 and 2009).

Entre 1886 y 2009 los salarios chilenos sufrieron 5 episodios de profunda caída (1905-15, 1931-32, 1954-55, 1972-73 y 1982-85) que afectaron seriamente la economía familiar de los trabajadores. Dos de ellos correspondieron a crisis externas que dañaron la cuenta corriente y la cuenta financiera de la balanza de pagos (Gran Depresión de 1929 y Crisis de la Deuda Latinoamericana en 1982, respectivamente). Pero en los otros tres casos (1905-15, 1954-55 y 1972-73) actuaron graves desórdenes monetarios internos que desembocaron en brotes inflacionarios severos. Debido a su naturaleza diferente, mientras que en las 2 situaciones generadas externamente se respondió con políticas expansivas (devaluación para recuperar el consumo y financiar el gasto público), en las situaciones de inflación desatada se generaron motines sociales o fue imperativo ejecutar políticas fiscales y monetarias contractivas que, al acentuar el desempleo, empeoraron el conflicto social. Ante entornos desfavorables que diferían en su gravedad, las estrategias familiares deben haber tenido tonalidades diferentes.

Between 1886 and 2009 Chilean wages suffered 5 episodes of deep decline (1905-15, 1931-32, 1954-55, 1972-73 and 1982-85) that seriously affected the family economy of workers. Two of them corresponded to external crises that damaged the current account and the financial account of the balance of payments (Great Depression of 1929 and Crisis of the Latin American Debt in 1982, respectively). But in the other three cases (1905-15, 1954-55 and 1972-73) there were serious internal monetary disorders that led to severe inflationary outbreaks. Due to its different nature, while in the 2 externally generated situations it was responded with expansionary policies (devaluation to recover consumption and finance public spending), in situations of unleashed inflation, social riots were generated or it was imperative to execute fiscal and monetary policies contractions that, by accentuating unemployment, worsened the social conflict. In the face of unfavorable environments that differed in their severity, family strategies must have had different tonalities.

Dans le cadre des recherches menées au sein du programme Time-Us, Manuela Martini (Larhra – Université Lyon 2) et Anne Montenach (Telemme – Université Aix-Marseille) ont participé à l’ «European Social Science History Conference» qui s’est tenue à Belfast du 4 au 7 avril 2018. En collaboration avec Ariadne Schmidt (Leiden University), elles ont organisé la session “Women’s wages and time allocation in Western Europe during pre-industrial times (16th-Early 20th Centuries)”, durant laquelle elles ont proposé chacune une analyse des processus de fixation des salaires – et des conflits et négociations qui en découlent – ainsi qu’une réflexion sur la division du travail entre hommes et femmes au sein de la Fabrique lyonnaise, entre la fin du XVIIème et la fin du XIXème siècle.

Anne Montenach a présenté un papier intitule «“The Bazar Economy of Trades” : gender and wage systems in the late Seventeeth and Eighteenth-century textile industry »:

“In Lyon, at the end of the eighteenth century women formed a major part of the workforce. The silk industry (Grande Fabrique) employed up to 35,000 workers in 1788 and relied heavily on female labour, despite the fact that women’s right to work was regularly challenged by urban guilds (Garden, 1970; Cayez, 1978; Juratic and Pellegrin, 1994; Hafter, 1995 and 2007). While the spouses and daughters of masters, who numbered around 4,000 at the end of the eighteenth century, had special privileges allowing them to weave outside of family workshops, up to 19,000 ancillary workers – women and children carrying out most of the other tasks – were underpaid to do exhausting work. As D. Hafter notes, ‘all our statistics about eighteenth- century employment in Lyon are skewed by the deficiencies in our knowledge of women’s production and wages’ (Hafter, 1995: 46). Thus there is still considerable work to be done in order to reconstruct the gender characteristics of wage forms and wage systems in early modern textile manufacturing. From this perspective, this paper will concentrate on massive but still underexploited sources, namely the Lyon guild records of infringements which offer a vast array of small-scale wage conflicts. These 53 volumes for the 114-year period 1667-1781 will help us to highlight the various forms of wage-payment which, according to M. Sonenscher, ‘owed more to the bazaar economy of the trades than to the prescription of the law’ (Sonenscher, 1989: 174), and their evolution during the long eighteenth century. In order to understand better this ‘face to face economy’, embedded in social and gender norms, and to shed light on the gender-based asymmetry of wage systems, a particular attention will be paid to the precise nature of the work that was undertaken, to the impact of negotiation on wage and tariffs formation, and to the agency that both male and female workers of various familial and professional positions could develop – or not – in the labour market.”

Manuela Martini a présenté une communication intitulée “Gendered division of work and wage conflict in the Lyon silk trades at the end of the 19^th century”:

“Workshops and factories lastingly coexisted in the 19th century Lyon textile production system. In the second half of the century the urban silk industry system’s crisis and the gradual shift to the countryside, especially with the expansion of the factory system, did not lead to an immediate liquidation and abrupt substitution of workshop production. High-quality handmade production remained profitable. Master craftsmen and their wives continued to produce specialized fabrics without mechanization in their workshops through a process of workforce reduction, feminization of labour, and increase in the family dimension along paired with a reduction in male co-resident employees in the workshop. One of the conditions of this “resistance” of craft production was the importance of a skilled female workforce.
This shift and the massive presence of women also in countryside factories make the case of Lyon especially compelling for the study of wage differentials and wage conflicts in the second half of the 19th century. Questioning quantitative data and exploring qualitative sources produced both by textile workers and public officers, this paper addresses three interconnected issues: the mechanisms of tariffs’ construction, the conflicts arising around men’s and women’s wages, and the changing contribution of women’s wages to their family incomes.”

Journées d’étude organisées dans le cadre du programme ANR TIME-US

Aix-en-Provence 20-21 octobre 2017

Ces deux journées d’étude, organisées à la Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme dans le cadre du projet Time-Us, ont permis de réfléchir et de discuter des questions relatives au travail des hommes et des femmes dans l’industrie textile principalement en Europe du Nord (Angleterre, Belgique, Suède) et en Espagne de la fin du XVIIIème siècle au début du XXème siècle. Rassemblant des historiens de l’économie et des chercheurs en humanités numériques, ces journées d’étude ont permis d’aborder plusieurs questions centrales et essentielles aux réflexions menées dans le cadre du programme Time-Us. D’une part, l’ensemble des recherches présentées, menées sur le long terme ou bien nouvellement initiées, a mis en lumière le poids du travail des femmes aussi bien dans le développement économique au cours de l’industrialisation, mais également son apport financier non marginale au sein des ménages. D’autre part, ces différentes interventions ont abordé la question transverse de la temporalité. Certaines présentations ont mis l’accent sur la dimension temporelle propre à l’évolution du rôle économique des femmes au cours de leur vie et selon leur statut marital. D’autres ont axé leur réflexion sur la relation entre les cycles économiques au cours d’une année et la durée du temps de travail des ouvriers et ouvrières dans l’industrie textile.

La richesse de ces présentations a également permis d’ouvrir de nouvelles pistes quant à l’usage et à la nature des sources et des méthodes à mobiliser.

Manuela Martini – Université Lyon 2

Introduction

Manuela Martini opened the conference by presenting the Time-Us project. The aim of the research program is to construct and analyse a documentary corpus on women’s and men’s work, their remuneration and household time budgets of textile workers in France between the end of the Seventeenth century and the beginning of the Twentieth century. She stressed two main questions which lead the Time-Us team’s researches: what is the link between economic growth and women’s contribution to household income? What is the relationship between paid work and women’s life cycle? The aim of Time-Us project is to renew interest in study of wages and wage differentials, but also to bring a new approach to the study of historical household budgets in the main French industrial cities (Paris, Lille, Marseille and Lyon). To lead the research project, different sources are mobilized such as accounting books, industrial censuses and survey, social conflicts and police and judicial courts records, trade organizations, guild sources and workers’ diaries.

As part of Time-Us project, several scientific seminars have been organized to promote, discuss and spread researches. The first one took place in Lyon in 27^th and 28^th march 2017 and was about uses of time and wages of men and women during the first industrialization (“Usages du temps et rémunérations des femmes et des hommes pendant la première industrialisation. Notions et perspectives empiriques”.) Furthermore, two international congresses are already scheduled : Manuela Martini (LARHRA), Anne Montech (TELEMME) and Ariadne Schmidt (University of Leiden) will organize session titled “Women’s wages and time allocation in Western Europe during pre-industrial and industrial times (16th-early 20th centuries)” at the European Social Science History Congress in Belfast (4th-7th april 2018). With Cristina Borderias (University of Barcelone) and Aurora Gomez Galvarriato (University of Mexico), Manuela Martini will coordinate a session during the World Economic History Congress in Boston titled “Coping with crisis: labor market, public policies and household economy. A comparative perspective on unequally industrialized regions from the mid-18th century to the interwar period – Mediterranean Europe, Central and Southern America” (29^th july-3^rd august 2018).

Peter Scholliers – Vrje Universiteit Brussel

A Gender Wage Gap in Cotton Weaving?  The Voorman Mill in Ghent, c. 1900

Debates on gender wage gaps in Europe (and, actually, the world) in the 19^th and a large part of the 20^th century have been blurred by studying very dissimilar categories of workers (with different tasks, working hours, skills, and labour market conditions). This has led to basically two views on wage inequality: the economic, and the social-cultural (or productivity differentiation versus discrimination / custom). Following recent research, this presentation focused on a single company (the Voortman cotton mill in Ghent), more particularly, its weaving section, aiming at making meaningful comparisons. Wage systems, working hours and actual weekly earnings of male and female workers has been studied between 1891 and 1914 (based on wage ledgers of the mill), including attention to the age of workers. Peter Scholliers’ study on the Voortman cotton mill in Ghent led to very interesting conclusions. He observed a small gender earning differentials which did not emerge out of working time or wage rates, but of working with different equipment. He emphasised the fact that the gap reveals very low wages of both men and women compared to other Ghent mills. To conclude, Peter Sholliers stressed that ideology of male breadwinner was unattainable between 1890 and 1914: women’s work was not additional, but fundamental for survival.

Maria Ågren – University of Uppsala

The Uses and Usefulness of Language Technology to the Gender and Work Project

While small-scale individual projects are often of very high quality, some scholarly problems are simply too big to be feasible for one person only. Such problems require a large group of scholars making concerted efforts to achieve the same objective. Moreover, we need not only several researchers who can divide the general problem into a set of sub-problems; we also need a common strategy for data collection and data sharing.

The problem of how men, women and children supported themselves in the early modern period is a good example of such a big problem. For many reasons it benefits hugely from a collaborative approach. The lack of good early modern occupational statistics (for Sweden) and the problematic character of many occupational titles forces the researchers to look for other types of data, namely information on time use or practices. Culling information on time use from handwritten sources is, however, a very time-consuming task. It requires both collaboration between the scholars who collect the data and access to good research infrastructure, i.e. databases where the information can be stored and searched systematically.

But even with a collaborative team and good database facilities, finding out how women and men supported themselves in the early modern period remains difficult for conceptual reasons. It is difficult analytically to discern and define “work” as opposed to “non-work” because of the “entangled” nature of much early modern work. Since so much work (both men’s and women’s) was unpaid and performed in many different places, it cannot be identified as that for which somebody is paid or that which takes place in the workshop (or some other place). Moreover, the division of work was flexible: both men and women performed most types of work and no one was a specialist. The flexible division of work went in hand with a household model described as “the open house”. Commercial and cooperative activities involved both genders and transcended the borders of the household. Maria Ågren also stressed that the division of work was structured along lines of marital status rather than gender: married women were regarded as capable of governing. Nevertheless, men were overrepresented in certain types of work (military, administrative) and women were overrepresented among the poor.

In her presentation, Maria Ågren has also discussed some of these problems in relation to the database GaW and the so-called verb-oriented method used within the Gender & Work project at Uppsala university. She has also presented the main results of the project so far, and suggested directions in which research might move.

Eva Pettersson – University of Uppsala

Automatic Extraction of Verb Phrases Describing Work from Early Modern Swedish Text

In the Gender and Work project, historians are interested in what men and women did for a living in the Early Modern Swedish society. To find out, historians manually read a number of documents from the time, to find and extract text passages describing how different persons supported themselves. During this work, the historians have come to the conclusion that working activities often are described in the form of verb phrases, such as to ‘sell fish’, ‘chop wood’, or ‘serve as a maid’.

In her work, Eva Petterson presented a method for automatically extracting verb phrases that are likely to describe work from Early Modern Swedish text, with spelling normalisation as a core component. In the spelling normalisation step, the historical input text is automatically normalised to a more modern spelling. This enables the use of existing tools for linguistic analysis of the text, trained on modern language. Based on the linguistic analysis, verb phrases are then automatically identified and ranked so that those that are more likely to describe working activities are presented at the top of the results list (in their original, historical spelling). The aim is that instead of reading whole books in the search for relevant text passages, the historians would only need to go through a list of automatically extracted text passages, keeping those of interest, and discarding the rest.

Jane Humphries – All Souls College, University of Oxford

Benjamin Schneider – Merton College, University of Oxford

Spinning the Industrial Revolution

The prevailing explanation for why the Industrial Revolution occurred first in Britain during the last quarter of the eighteenth century is Robert Allen’s (2009) ‘high-wage economy’ view, which claims that the high cost of labor relative to capital and fuel incentivized innovation and the adoption of new techniques. This paper has presented new empirical evidence on hand spinning before the Industrial Revolution and has demonstrated that there was no such ‘high-wage economy’ in spinning, a leading sector of industrialization. The authors have quantified the working lives of frequently ignored female and child spinners who were crucial to the British textile industry with evidence of productivity and wages from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Spinning emerges as a widespread, low-productivity, low-wage employment, in which wages did not rise substantially in advance of the jenny and water frame. The motivation for mechanization must be sought elsewhere.

Carmen Sarasúa – Universidad Autonoma Barcelona

Remuneration and Working Time of Men and Women Textile Workers in Eighteenth-century Spain: Methodological Problems

The textile sector was the largest industrial sector in 18^th century Europe, both in GDP and labor terms. Scarcely mechanized and very labor-intensive, it was also the largest source of employment outside agriculture. The textile labor force was also heavily feminized, with women’s low wages likely having a main role in this feminization.  Collecting data on textile wages poses however methodological problems that need to be addressed in advance. This paper has discussed these problems, focusing on the wool industry in 18^th century Spain. 

 Sophie McGeevor – The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, University of Cambridge

Imputing Wages for Housework using the Household Monographs of Frédéric Le Play

Frédéric Le Play’s household budgets and those of his followers contain systematic observations of the time-use of men, women and children in the mid nineteenth to early twentieth century. These budgets provide some of the earliest insights into the time-demands of women’s non-market work. In these budgets, Le Play imputes wages ‘in kind’ for some, but not all, housework. This paper has first explored why Le Play does this more than a hundred years before any economist is seriously considering the value of women’s housework to their families or wider society. Using Le Play’s English monographs, Sophie McGeevor has then demonstrated how contemporary sources of women’s wages can be used, in conjunction with Le Play’s household budgets, to create a more complete picture of the economic value of women’s work in this period. 

Amy L. Erickson – University of Cambridge

Fans and Fanny Burney: Hidden Manufacturing in Eighteenth-century London

The Burney family, including the writer Frances (Fanny) and the musician Charles, is one of the most-studied families of 18^th-century England. This paper has introduced Fanny’s mother and grandmother – both fan-makers, although their trade has never been noticed in the extensive historiography. Managed in domestic workshops, there are no factory records or account books to help us understand the division of labour in fan-making. This presentation has used the discovery of one fan-making family through trade cards and tax records to open a window on the industry. Fan-making employed women as well as men, and the trade was managed by both women and men. London was a major center of fan production in the 18^th century when the fashion was at its peak. (In a northern climate, fans were only ever a fashion accessory, but London manufacturers exported fans to Spain where they had more functional uses.) Fans were only one of many ephemeral luxury goods which produced a solid income for tens of thousands of women, and the tax records help us to model their numbers.

Tabitha Baker – University of Warwick

Re-assessing Women’s Work: Evidence from the Professional Embroidery Trade of Eighteenth-century France

Analysing the embroidery trade in eighteenth-century France necessitates a re-examination of gender roles in the world of early-modern work and artisanship. Frequently referred to as ‘women’s work’, ‘domestic’ and ‘feminine’ by both contemporary eighteenth-century commentators and modern-day scholars alike, such connotations neglect to account for the dynamic gender roles which occurred in this ancillary trade of the luxury market. During the early-modern period embroidery was increasingly professionalized as a result of the accelerated growth of luxury consumption across Europe. By the eighteenth century it was a well-established luxury trade in France and the rise in popularity of embroidered textiles from the 1770s onwards, particularly men’s waistcoats, opened up new opportunities for those working in the embroidery trade. However, it was men, especially in Paris, who dominated this activity which had at its core an inherently ‘female’ skill. How, then, did the professionalization of a traditionally domestic occupation affect women as wage earners and what sources can be used to interrogate this? Archival sources naturally promote the visibility of male embroiderers, particularly in Paris where the guild of embroiderers strictly regulated their trade and excluded women from the highest ranks of the occupation. Evidence of female embroiderers in the Parisian archives is scarce, and where they do appear, are mostly associated with their husband or father, or are the object of legal action waged by the guild. Yet in 1770, Charles Germain de Saint-Aubin declared in L’Art du brodeur that embroidery was an occupation in which women could earn one of the highest wages for their sex; as the only contemporary commentary on the trade, the way in which female embroiderers are portrayed in L’Art du brodeur is telling. Taking Saint-Aubin’s treatise as a useful starting point, this paper has investigated the accuracy of his assertions and has investigated the socio-economic reality of women in the embroidery trade of eighteenth-century France. With a comparative focus on Paris and Lyon, and using a variety of archival sources including legal disputes, bankruptcy papers, and the account books of merchants, T. Baker has examined the working practices, wages and career trajectories of female embroiderers in the second half of the eighteenth century. Finally, to what extent did the rise in popularity of embroidery in the 1770s equate to increased opportunities for women in the world of early-modern work? 

Malin Nilsson – University of Gothenburg

Seasonal Variation of Hours Worked in Home-based Industrial Production: Evidence from Sweden 1912

This study investigates patterns of seasonal variation in hours worked by women employed in home-based industrial production in Sweden 1912. Previous studies often describe workers in this type of production as the most flexible segment of industrial workers, and highly dependent on seasonal fluctuations in supply and demand. However, few have studied this empirically. This study relies on data from interviews with home-based workers. Principal Component Analysis is used to identify seasonal patterns and OLS regressions to identify the factors driving these fluctuations.

The results show surprisingly stable patterns in hours worked, most women worked 8 to 10 hours per day all year. Thus, while home-based workers were flexible in the sense that they all worked on piece-work contracts and provided their own means of production and place of work, their work was not essentially irregular or largely fluctuating by supply or demand-driven seasonal variations.

Dans le cadre du programme ANR TIME-US, ces journées d’étude sont coordonnées par:

Anne Montenach, Aix-Marseille Université, TELEMME

Manuela Martini, Université Lyon 2, LARHRA

Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme, 

salle Paul-Albert Février

Aix-en-Provence 20-21 octobre 2017

Programme

Jeudi 19 octobre après-midi : séance de travail avec les étudiants de Master (codage)

Vendredi 20 octobre

Matin 9h30h-12h30

Mot d’accueil : Xavier Daumalin, Directeur de l’UMR 7303 TELEMME

Introduction : Manuela Martini (Université Lyon 2-LARHRA)

Peter Scholliers (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), A Gender Wage Gap in Cotton Weaving?  The Voorman Mill in Ghent, c. 1900

(10h15-10h45) Pause-café

Session 1 : modératrice Anne Montenach (Aix-Marseille Université -TELEMME)

Maria Ågren  (University of Uppsala), The Uses and Usefulness of Language Technology to the Gender and Work Project

Eva Pettersson (University of Uppsala), Automatic Extraction of Verb Phrases Describing Work from Early Modern Swedish Text

Ouvre la discussion : Éric de La Clergerie (INRIA-Almanach)

12h30-14h : Déjeuner-buffet à la MMSH

Après-midi 14h-17h30

Session 2 : modérateur Olivier Raveux (TELEMME, CNRS)

Jane Humphries (All Souls College, University of Oxford) et Benjamin Schneider (Merton College, University of Oxford), Spinning the Industrial Revolution

Carmen Sarasúa (Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona), Remuneration and Working Time of  Men and Women Textile Workers in Eighteenth-century Spain: Methodological Problems

(15h30-16h) Pause-café

Sophie McGeevor (The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, University of Cambridge), Imputing Wages for Housework Using the Household Monographs of Frédéric Le Play

Ouvre la discussion : Claire Lemercier (CSO-SciencesPo CNRS, Paris)

Samedi 21 octobre

Matin 9h-13h

Session 3 : modérateur Matthieu de Oliveira (Université de Lille 3-IRHIS)

Amy L. Erickson  (The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, University of Cambridge), Fans and Fanny Burney: Hidden Manufacturing in Eighteenth-century London

Tabitha Baker (University of Warwick), Re-assessing Women’s Work: Evidence from the Professional Embroidery Trade of Eighteenth-century France

(10h30-11h) Pause-café

Malin Nilsson (University of Gothenburg), Seasonal Variation in Time Allocated to Textile Industrial Homework: Evidence from the Swedish Industrialization

Ouvre la discussion : Anaïs Albert (Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7-ICT)

13h : Déjeuner-buffet à la MMSH

Coordonné par:

Alain Cottereau, directeur d’études à l’EHESS (CEMS)

Stéphane Baciocchi, ingénieur d’études à l’EHESS (CRH)

Marie Paule Hille, maître de conférence à l’EHESS (CCJ)

Anne Lhuissier, chargée de recherche à l’INRA (CMH)

Les séances ont lieu de 13h à 17h, au 54 boulevard Raspail, 75006 Paris, salle A06_51, du 16 novembre 2017 au 21 juin 2018.

Le séminaire de 2017-2018 ouvre un cycle de deux années qui portera sur des investigations internationales de collectifs d’enquête menant des travaux de terrain et de première main, leurs approches et leurs résultats. L’ethnocomptabilité fait partie de la démarche de plusieurs d’entre eux. Dans ce cadre, et en lien avec le programme d’enquête sur les Rémunérations et usages du temps des femmes et des hommes en France de la fin du XVIIe au début du XXe siècle (ANR – TIME-US), plusieurs séances du séminaire seront consacrées aux formes d’organisation de l’activité textile. En particulier, un domaine d’enquête est à redessiner, qui prendra en considération l’ensemble des formes d’activité de textile et d’habillement, formes interdépendantes, depuis la simple production domestique pour soi, jusqu’aux modalités de coopération ou confrontation internationales, s’étendant au commerce et à l’utilisation. Sur le plan historique, des sources jusque là inconnues, du XIXe et XXe siècle, découvertes par les organisateurs ou participants, seront mises en perspective.

Programme prévisionnel des séances:

• 16 novembre 2017 : Budgets de famille et ethnocomptabilité. Histoire et théorie.
• 21 décembre 2017: Enquête collective sur l’accueil des réfugiés.
• 18 janvier 2018 : La fabrique collective parisienne. 1. Le tisseur en châle de Paris.
• 15 février 2018 : La fabrique collective parisienne. 2. Tailleur & tailleuse d’habits de Paris (1856).
• 15 mars 2018 : La fabrique collective parisienne. 3. L’enquête de P. du Maroussem sur le « vêtement à Paris », 1893-1896.
• 17 mai 2018: Ethnographie sur les marchands musulmans de “soierie et satin” sur la frontière sino-tibétaine.
• 21 juin 2018: Monographies chinoises.