1This volume arose from a Leverhulme International Network on gender and work in early modern Europe. Rather than a collection of individual conference papers, it is a compilation of state of the field essays on subjects such as households, care, agriculture, rural manufactures, urban markets, migration, and war. More importantly, the essays highlight the contributions of recent research and how scholarship on women’s and gendered work is changing the narrative of early modern economic history more broadly. The editors’ primary interests are in connecting research on women’s work to the “whole economy”, meaning both examining women’s and men’s work together and incorporating the evidence and findings about women’s work into the larger economic narrative about early modern Europe. While the editors are well known for their scholarship on women’s work in England and Scandinavia, they and their contributors have done an excellent job of including research on southern, central, and eastern Europe as well.

2The Introduction by Margaret Hunt and Alexandra Shepard lays out some of the key themes in the collection. Change is the focus here, both how women produced and contributed to economic change in the pre-industrial era of 1500-1800, and how this volume “might produce historiographic change by showcasing decades of research on women, gender and work that has pioneered new conceptual, methodological and empirical perspectives” (p. 1). This emphasis marks a departure from scholarship that has posited continuity in the working lives of women across the medieval and early modern periods. Hunt and Shepard also situate this volume in the context of a century of scholarship not just by historians, but also by feminist economists, sociologists, and anthropologists, and thus more directly insert the historical scholarship on women’s work back into economic debates, discussions, and models. The Introduction and essays are in dialogue with debates on productive vs. reproductive labor, gender and agricultural work, the significance of the household and household labor, and contributions to economic growth on the macro level.

3Maria Ågren’s chapter on Households focuses on erroneous assumptions about the household and labor in the early modern era. She argues that multiple members of the household brought in income from outside the home before the Industrial Revolution and that not just women but also most men engaged in multiple economic activities. She also suggests a reconceptualization of the “economy of makeshifts” engaged in by women, and posits that multiple sources of income should be seen as a sign of flexibility, sustainability, and resilience, rather than economically backward. Ågren notes that scholars generalizing from taxation and census-like records, which often listed only male heads of household and assigned them one occupation, have led to erroneous ideas about women and work. This had more to do with patriarchal assumptions about household power rather than the complex realities of labor in the early modern household. The theoretical part of Ågren’s essay is more provocative than the case studies of early modern letter writers but her larger point about reading letters for evidence of women’s and men’s economic roles is useful. Ågren and a few other contributors to this collection also introduce the idea of evaluating the economic viability of households in the past not just on the basis of subsistence living but on thriving – an important change in perspective.

4Alexandra Shepard’s essay on Care “makes a case for treating care as a variable in the assessment of early modern economic performance” (p. 53). In this way, Shepard goes up against the longstanding notion of care work as emotionally rewarding, charitable, and voluntary, and thus outside of any economic context. Shepard also argues for emphasizing the historical variability in the provision of care as a way to show that such labor was not unchanging, natural, or external to the economy as many economists have assumed. Moreover, the unequal distribution of care (by gender, class, and race) has costs (both economic and social) that we must acknowledge. Shepard reminds us that early modern Europe was demographically very young which could potentially have meant a high level of care work but scholarship shows that married women did not do all this care work themselves. Rather, older siblings and servants provided care to younger children, enabling married women to do productive work. The assumption that mothers fit their productive work around their care work is contested by this evidence, which shows the opposite. Illness, mortality, and warfare also led to high levels of care work in the early modern era. An economic price or value can be put on this care work by examining the wages paid for care work by individuals, parishes, and institutions. Institutional records show that women’s care work was not all low-paid and low-skilled (e.g. midwifery) and that some took on managerial or administrative roles (e.g. matrons) which came with authority and relatively good wages. Care work such as wetnursing and fostering was also relatively monetized in early modern Europe. While Shepard’s summary shows that care work was both paid and necessary to support the economy, necessity of course did not equal value in contemporary eyes.

5Jane Whittle and Hilde Sandvik’s essay on Agriculture addresses the misguided assumption that early modern women did not do agricultural work in an era when Europe’s population was largely rural and its economy primarily agricultural. This misconception was based on scholars generalizing ploughing to mean all agricultural work, assuming women only worked indoors or close by the home, and misapplying ethnographic studies to the past. Historical evidence from the early modern era instead shows women actively engaged in agricultural work. Women were more involved in pastoral than arable husbandry such as caring for animals and dairying. And although women did not often plough, they did regularly engage in sowing, weeding, and harvesting, as well as planting and hoeing root crops (as opposed to cereal). Whittle and Sandvik downplay male strength as the important factor in the gendered division of labor, but there is no denying that women’s wages were on average lower than men’s. The authors also provide a useful summary of regional variations in agricultural work that shows the role of women in producing wine and olives in southern Europe, sheep and cow herding in Alpine regions for example.

6Carmen Sarasúa’s essay on Rural Manufactures examines the underappreciated role of these industries and the neglect of women’s participation in them. When economic historians began to theorize about the importance of proto-industrialization they focused on technology, capital and entrepreneurs, but not on labor, especially female workers. Sarasúa’s essay showcases women’s roles in rural industry by summarizing empirical studies from across early modern Europe and argues that rather than being marginal participants in the early modern economy, we have missed the central role of women in driving the economy. They did so not through consumption, as argued by Jan de Vries (2008) in his model of an Industrious Revolution, but through their production. It would have been good for the editors to put Sarasúa’s piece in dialogue with Whittle and Sandvik on Agriculture since they show that when agricultural demand was down women turned to other work, especially domestic manufactures. Women’s labor was in demand in domestic textile production (especially spinning), but also in Spain’s royal iron manufactury, in Nordic mining, and in pottery, with women’s labor participation rates exceptionally high in the eighteenth century. Less addressed by the author is that women’s labor was in demand because of the relatively low wages that employers could pay them. Sarasúa focuses instead on the “negotiating capacity” women may have had due to contributing their wages to the household and the ability for unmarried women to support themselves.

7While early modern women’s urban work has been better studied, Anna Bellavitis’s essay on Urban Markets questions whether this scholarship on women has led to the rewriting of the “history of work” in early modern European cities. A significant contribution of her piece is the compilation of statistics on women workers throughout early modern European cities, although some summing up of the empirical data would not have gone amiss. Bellavitis provides data on women whose occupations were registered in various sources, including censuses, court, tax and charitable institution records. Women’s occupations appear much more in court records than in censuses, illustrating Ågren’s earlier point that relying on census and tax records underrepresents women’s work. Bellavitis also includes information about illicit women workers such as prostitutes, smugglers, and black marketeers. The author notes that women were able to manipulate and work “within structures that were not in their favour” (p. 163). It is notable that she and most of the other contributors eschew the word patriarchy and a sustained discussion of how the gendered ideology affected women’s economic opportunities, recognition, and remuneration.

8Amy Erickson and Ariadne Schmidt’s essay on Migration fully addresses labor migration and its economic impact as well as the neglect of gender as an analytical category in the literature on the topic. The authors counter assumptions that female migration was low until the modern era, that women (but not men) migrated as part of a family, and that female migrants moved short distances. Women also engaged in seasonal migration for work like men, but neither their movement nor men’s was necessarily “emancipatory” for women. European governments preferred to restrict or criminalize both male and female mobility, especially single women’s. The authors argue that we need to study migration not just as an economic response but also as a driver of economic change.

9In her essay on War, Margaret Hunt notes that wars created both economic opportunities and wrought economic destruction. She rightfully points out that while we know a lot about how World War I and II affected women’s work, we do not have a sense of this for the early modern era. Military history topics for the early modern era such as the “military revolution” and the “fiscal-military state” have largely neglected women. When women do enter the picture it is largely as camp followers, prostitutes, nurses, or cross-dressing soldiers. Scholars argue that the excision of women workers from the theatre of war is a sign of a military’s professionalization and modernization, thereby further removing the economic work of women from the picture. Hunt asks: how did war affect local and family economies? How did women cope? How were women’s economic activities and contributions affected by war? She also says we do not know enough about women’s conscripted and coerced labor, or the supplying and provisioning work that women did. War monetized to an unprecedented degree cooking, lodging, and sex, areas of work in which women predominated. The individual chapters of this volume do an excellent job of summarizing the historiography; making them very useful for those new to the field and the classroom. The areas for future research should be attended to by those active in the field. And those who work on the early modern economy, but who have not incorporated gender, now have a clear road map of how to do so. This volume will be a longstanding resource and reference work for the field.