A Companion to Global Gender History. Группа авторов
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promoted gender difference and division that lasted for centuries (Bitel, 1998: 108). But as influential as they were, they did not completely circumscribe women’s economic activities.
There is historical evidence that in this period women controlled their personal property and that widows could conduct business. Women and men on the rural estates of feudal Europe farmed and performed hard manual labor alongside one another. Women took responsibility for domestic tasks – including meal preparation, baking bread, and brewing beer – as well as textile production and garment‐making for household use. In some cases, Muslim, North African, or Eastern European women slaves worked as servants in the households of rich nobles or as agricultural laborers on the estates of medieval Europe (Stuard, 1995). In spite of Christian doctrines emphasizing women’s inferiority, and legal customs that limited women’s formal rights, women participated in the public urban life of the eleventh and twelfth centuries as traders, selling beer, crafts, clothing, or agricultural goods at local markets. In the decentralized European societies of this period plagued by conflict and war, women often assumed responsibility for administering estates, if not entire territories, in the absence of men. A similar flexible division of labor also existed in feudal Japan, where men served in the military, and women prevailed in the household and held important positions in religious institutions. This situation lasted until Japanese rulers centralized state authority and diminished the power of local feudal lords.
Even in socially stratified, complex societies, women worked at the same tasks as men and enjoyed a relatively high status based on their productive activities. Ethnohistorical evidence suggests considerable fluidity in the relationship of gender and technical expertise among the Maya of Central America for example, where women were primarily responsible for skilled production of pottery, produced with clay dug by men. And research on the pre‐Hispanic Americas has also shown that women were responsible for the massive cloth production central to the Andean economy (Arden, 2008). These patterns of gender complementarity continued with the development of more centralized states, urbanization, and the emergence of new economic institutions and relations.
Merchant Capitalism, Gender Ideology, and Protoindustrialization
Between the fourteenth and mid‐eighteenth centuries, new developments transformed the political and economic landscapes of Europe and Latin America: centralized states and new legal and religious discourses emerged, along with new economic institutions. Historians have argued that these developments led to growing gender divisions and the devaluation of women’s labor (Wiesner, 1986; Howell, 1986; Hanley, 1989). The emergence of centralized states ruled by strong leaders with coherent legal systems and structures, as in France and Britain, allowed kings and their bureaucrats to distinguish more carefully between men’s and women’s rights. After about the sixteenth century in many areas, women lost the ability to dispose freely of their property – with serious implications for their ability to run a business or ply a trade. Yet, as scholars have recently learned, these developments did not have the same consequences everywhere. For example, although German laws attempted to make it illegal for unmarried women to migrate to cities, the same was not true in France or England. New evidence suggests that in many places the opportunities for women’s work increased rather than declined (Crowston, 2008).
In cities and towns, male‐dominated guilds emerged in the fourteenth century as powerful urban institutions that regulated access to trades, professional training (apprenticeships), and production standards. Guilds sometimes admitted women and in some trades in a few cities, women formed their own guilds. In these women’s guilds, they participated fully in production, sold goods, and managed accounts. In the fifteenth century, merchant capitalists began to engage in small‐scale production and trade in towns and rural areas, hiring families to produce goods for the market. This system of domestic production, known as protoindustrialization, constituted a critical stage in the accumulation of merchant capital. Women’s domestic production (such as spinning thread for textile manufacture) played a vital role in this system.
Beginning in the middle of the fifteenth century, protoindustrial production began to threaten urban guild control over production, and guilds tightened regulations and access to trades. Gender divisions sharpened as guilds distinguished more carefully between highly paid skilled male labor and unskilled female labor, but with some geographical differences. Although in Germany and the Low Countries guilds progressively devalued the work of female domestic textile producers, in France the monarchy required urban women producers to organize in guilds. Women labored successfully in both guild and informal non‐guild urban occupations alongside rural, domestic producers in France, England, and Italy. Girls received training in garment‐making and tapestry through informal apprenticeships. Thus, the emergence of strong, centralized states like England or France did not automatically result in the decline of women’s productive activity, and in many locations their economic opportunities expanded (Crowston, 2008).
Even where women and men labored at different tasks in different spatial settings, as in English rural society of the sixteenth century, women’s work –at spinning for example—made a critical contribution to the family economy and could be highly valued (Flather, 2008). At the same time, productive activity became progressively more differentiated by gender in both guild and non‐guild labor, and some forms of women’s labor lost value in market economies. Even in cases where women performed the same work as men, as in tailoring in eighteenth century America, independent (and successful) women earned less than men for producing the same articles of clothing (Miller). In many places, women’s home‐based production for the family as opposed to for the market– from making soap to sewing clothes – gradually fell under the rubric “housewifery” or “social reproduction.” These were activities designed to sustain and reproduce life but were no longer considered “work.” (Quataert, 1985; Wiesner‐Hanks, 1998: 226).
With these developments, class differences emerged more visibly than ever. As middle‐class merchant capitalists prospered, whether in Europe, Asia, or in North America, their wives hired lower‐class women as servants, allowing middle‐class women the leisure to beautify their homes or engage in charitable activities rather than work for wages. Between roughly 1400 and 1750, the growth of merchant capitalism and protoindustrial production, new technologies, tools, and crops, and new ideologies praising women’s domestic non‐productive labor had negative consequences for women. Men took control of skilled labor, assuring that women performed less skilled work and earned less than they did. The mutually reinforcing effects of these new economic systems, ideology, and the emergence of centralized states and bodies of law continued to shape gender divisions and gender inequalities in labor for centuries to come.
Although many of these developments occurred in Europe, gender divisions also emerged more visibly in other areas of the world, which came into contact with Western European merchant capitalists and empire builders, between roughly 1450 and 1750. In imperial China, women’s work in silk production, harvesting silkworms, producing silk cloth, and harvesting and processing tea took on new importance as these products were traded in Western Europe (Lu, 2004). When the first European explorers came to the city‐states of Central America in the sixteenth century, they encountered sophisticated and complex societies and economies. Although both sexes farmed, men mined and worked gold into ornaments, and women’s cloth production continued to be essential to local economies.
Elsewhere however, growing divisions of labor diminished women’s position. Historians and anthropologists’ observations of North American Native societies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries suggest that European contact and settlement, the appearance of new technologies, the growth of trade, as well as the development of the state, increased gender inequality. Among the Plains Indians of the West, the introduction of horses by the Spanish in the seventeenth century and the development of a market for buffalo hides in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were crucial factors: men’s acquisition of horses allowed them to hunt buffalo more effectively than previously. Instead of participating in collective hunting, women perfected the skills of tanning and processing the hides. Yet, as important as their work was to the economy of the tribe, women lost status in their communities in contrast to men, whose success in hunting and development of military prowess on horseback lent their