Identity, Labor, and Welfare: the Worlds of Work and Family

The history of women’s work has its own history. Women’s work was a central issue in much of the earliest modern research on women’s history. Alice Clark’s Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1919) and Ivy Pinchbeck’s Women Workers in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (1930) are both well-known and were innovative for their time.¹ Perhaps less-well known but important for French women’s history was Léon Abensour’s chapter “La Femme du peuple” in La Femme et le Féminisme en France avant la Révolution (1923), rarely surpassed for detail.² As the feminist movement of the seventies began to questions women’s roles, female historians pioneered a new wave of women’s history, while Pinchbeck’s and Clark’s studies were reissued, along with a string of essays, many relating to women’s work, by the historians Natalie Zemon Davis, Joan Scott, Louise Tilly and Olwen Hufton on France; and the historians Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz and Karin Hausen on Germany. Adding significantly to historical debates about women’s work was Scott and Tilly’s Women, Work and Family (1978), which explicitly identified and analyzed relationships among various role expectations for French and English women.³ It was in certain ways a pioneering book constructed on a narrow empirical base. This was necessarily the case in 1978, when so much basic research was yet to be carried out. Much of the research on women significantly coincided with the emergence of the new social history, a history from below, which concerned itself with the “workers” and the “plebeians.” While contemporaries and historians often disregarded women as “workers,” increasingly they recognized women as contributors to the so-called family economy.

As a research base began to build up, historians also began to look for more explanatory frameworks within which to understand the character of women’s work and its exclusions, as well as women’s agency within workplaces. A number of key issues mediate relationships between women and their labor, some shared with men, of course. Since concepts of gender, status, and power shape our understanding of work, and establish women’s specific kinds of participation as workers, we must look for ways to understand the nature and character of the work experience. While women’s work is delineated by factors such as economy, class, and demography, notions about women’s (and men’s) spatial and social distributions are...