A Bitter Living: Women, Markets, and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany (review)

Inequality in compensation and valuation of men's and women's work has persisted for hundreds of years. Although Ogilvie focuses on early modern Germany, the questions that she pursues and the methods that she deploys offer models for any scholar who seeks to understand why "[p]ower and influence over worldly goods is divided between the sexes very unequally" (1). She argues that women throughout history have enjoyed less access to resources because they "have had less freedom of choice in production and consumption" (1). Scholars have advanced a number of explanations for this situation. Some have maintained that the reasons are technological: Women's work depended on their physical endowments. Others have preferred a cultural approach that highlights customs and mentalities, focusing, for instance, on how particular cultural factors structured marriage patterns, education, sexuality, and so on. A third major approach—which Ogilvie terms "institutional"— analyzes the organization of the particular societies in which women lived and worked.

Although Ogilvie notes that each of these approaches provides general answers to the question of inequality, they all have their flaws and, when assessed one against the other, fail to satisfy. Therefore, she rejects these monocausal, macrolevel interpretations in favor of a time- allocation model that, she insists, better reveals the dynamics of work for both men and women. In short, she proposes that differences in gender-specific work patterns arose "from individual decisions about how to use one's time" (13). These decisions inevitably occurred within a "framework of constraints," among which were technology, cultural norms, and institutions (13).

After setting the stage through a careful examination of the social and demographic makeup of her selected area, two districts in Württemberg, she applies her time-allocation analysis to four groups of women—daughters and maidservants, married women, widows, and independent unmarried women. She usually prefers socioeconomic and social-institutional explanations rather than cultural or technological ones. She maintains, for instance, that "the retention of offspring in the household was not determined . . . by technological considerations" but was strongly influenced by the socioeconomic characteristics that her econometric analysis uncovered (55). Household structure was never "a faithful expression of either technological efficiency or cultural norms" (55). Broader and more provocative is her assessment of the overall economic results of inequality in male–female work. Preindustrial societies placed restrictions on women's work, consumption, and productivity, thereby hurting not only women (and children) but also wider society in "terms of reduced welfare and stifled growth" (351). The costs were high.

One of the great strengths of Ogilvie's study is the rigorous testing of each interpretation against the others. By employing qualitative and quantitative materials for Wildberg and Ebhausen and by drawing comparisons from secondary literature on other areas, she weaves an intricately patterned cloth of influences and results. Hers is not an easy book to read, requiring close attention to the structure of her subtle and complex arguments. But the effort will be well spent by anyone interested in the role of women in early modern times, in how economies grew (or did not), and in how various methodological approaches can be convincingly combined.