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  • Making a Living, Making a Difference: Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society ed. by Maria Ågren
  • Amy M. Froide
Making a Living, Making a Difference: Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society
Maria Ågren.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2017
xi + 258 pp., $38.95 (paper)

This volume is one of the first examples of a big data project in the humanities, and as such it makes both a methodological and a historiographical contribution. Editor Maria Ågren is the team leader of the Gender and Work Project at Uppsala University, and the book was collectively written with the help of fourteen other project participants. Tabulations of the project's data are readily available, but the researchers do a nice job of using specific examples and cases to illustrate their larger points. The researchers began with a large question: how did people in early modern Sweden use their time to make a living? The answers the researchers found provide compelling glimpses into how work differed by gender, social, and marital status, as well as how work connected to marriage, family, and the state.

Using court records, accounts, petitions, and diaries, the Gender and Work project gathered more than sixteen thousand separate references to work activities. To glean these instances of work, the researchers employed what Ingrid Almqvist has called the "verb-oriented" method (viii). The team culled their sources for verb phrases describing work activities (e. g., "repay husband's debt," "shoot animals," and "drive away interloper") (35). This approach to the history of work has some advantages in that it provides more data on work done by people outside formal institutions as well as on people who did not have occupational titles (women, young people, the poor). But there are also some downsides to the approach: with every work activity recorded in the database regarded as equal, power relationships and context are lacking unless supplied from elsewhere.

The analysis of verb phrases describing work activities reveals both similarities and differences between men's and women's work. Historians of early modern women regularly characterize women's work in that era as intermittent, supplementary, and informal. This book shows that men's work could also be "intermittent, casual, and subordinate" (25). Of course, the verb-oriented method avoids issues of remuneration and hierarchy, which the authors admit; nevertheless, not focusing solely on gender and pay inequality allows for examinations of other issues surrounding labor. Sorting data by category and gender reveals that women slightly edged men out in only two (of sixteen) areas of work: "care" and "food and accommodation." Otherwise, every other category of work was practiced by more men than women, most notably "administration and justice," "agriculture and forestry," "crafts and construction," and "transport." The big data backs up what historians have largely thought about male versus female occupations. The researchers, however, prefer to focus on the flexibility of work, noting that there were no [End Page 123] categories in which women were entirely absent (except for the military) and that women frequently performed agricultural labor. The other area of flexibility the data reveals is the multiple employments people engaged in that had nothing to do with their occupational title. For instance, soldiers only engaged in warfare-related activities 7 percent of the time (36).

Another of the project team's emphases is how work in early modern Sweden was collective in nature rather than performed in isolation. While the household unit has held powerful sway in early modern historiography, particularly as a unit of production, this book argues that the household was not a closed-off or self-sufficient unit. The data shows that only 26 percent of work activities were performed by or within a household unit, while 55 percent were linked to organizational structures such as estates, companies, and manufactories (63). Moreover, communal work was gendered, with men much more likely to work in teams and perform activities such as clearing roads and building structures. These findings go a long way toward complicating and decentering the family/household unit, although it is not yet clear if they are applicable to countries other than Sweden.

While complicating the relationship between the household...

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