Cover pic: Archivio di Stato di Prato, Comune e Comunità di Prato, b. 988 | Copyright: Ministero della Cultura, Archvio di Stato di Prato
The research project aims to improve our knowledge of gender dynamics within the workplace in the pre-industrial age, focusing on the Italian peninsula between the 15th and 19th century. The objective is to quantify in which activities and in what percentage women and men were engaged and to reconceptualize of some of the main categories in historical analysis and in the current debate, such as productive/unproductive, paid/unpaid, public/private, and domestic/care/non-domestic work. Therefore, the project includes every form of work, be it rewarded with money, non-monetary means, or carried out in compliance with family duties and forms of reciprocity between family members, parents, neighbours.
While previous studies have focused mainly on urban areas, this project will also examine the rural context, which it will attempt to quantify through a geo-referenced analysis, owing to the wealth of information available for Italy. Attention will also be paid to short and long-distant mobility.
New research will be carried out in the Italian archives, making innovative use of the abundance of information especially in criminal sources. The results will then be compared in a European perspective through a final conference. The project will create a qualitative and a quantitative database using a novel methodology that links the language used, space utilisation, and forms of mobility to accomplish its goals. It will also enable us to broaden the knowledge of the dynamics affecting the world of work in the pre-industrial age by linking gender, work, workplaces and mobility in a comparative and quantitative way for the first time.
A long term perspective will offer insight on dynamics that are very important for the current debate, which the outbreak of the pandemic has exacerbated. These include gender discrimination in the workplace, the work done in the domestic sphere, gender roles, and women’s contribution to national income.
This project will use the “verb-oriented method”, which was inaugurated by Sheilagh Ogilvie (2003), developed by Maria Ågren (2018) and more recently by Jane Whittle and Mark Hailwood (2018). However, in comparison to previous research, this project will expand on this methodology through a linguistic analysis of the expressions used by the actors of the time and through a spatial analysis of labour mobility.
The project’s starting point adopts a broader definition of labour than the one now in use, which is based on classical and neoclassical economics. By “labour”, we encompass all activities (including assistance and care) necessary for the survival, continuity and well-being of the household. This concept is best suited to the preindustrial time. The concept will, therefore, incorporate all those activities that fulfil the “third party criterion” (Reid 1934). Therefore, any unpaid work that could be replaced with purchased goods or services provided by a third party should be considered ‘productive’ and thus part of the economy (Whittle 2019). Where this method has been applied, for instance in the research on Northern and Central Europe, it has revealed a far more complex working reality, in which the distinctions between gender and space (public/private and domestic/non-domestic) were unclear or absent, and in which some activities (such as childcare or housekeeping) could also be paid. Therefore, thanks to the contribution and development of approaches elaborated from gender history, this will overcome the limitations of the current state of the art that focus predominantly on the labour market and consequently on paid work. The verb-oriented method focuses on every activity that is described by a verb, including unpaid, care and assistance work, work that is not identified by a job title and illegal activities. More women than men were employed in activities without a job title. The method focuses on verbal forms that are found in the sources and describes what individuals do at a given time. In this way, two issues can be overcome thanks to this methodology: the first is to capture unpaid work, and the second is to identify the work done by people who didn’t have a job title (mostly women). This method thus makes it possible to collect information without considering whether they are paid or are valued more or less at the time and overcomes the limitations of current studies that rely on job titles or the investigation of wage gaps. Instead, it allows us to understand what people were doing at a given time by documenting one or more of the jobs they were performing; moreover, it will enable us to evaluate whether they were executing an order or doing an activity on their initiative.
The verb-oriented methodology can employ different documentary sources, like court records, petitions, diaries, and correspondence. This method relies primarily on criminal and civil court records since it is impossible to interview the actors, as in ethnographic studies. In fact, during the deposition, the witnesses provide “incidental” information on the activities that occurred during the event under trial (see also Niccoli 2000; Voth 2000). People recount their activities in response to the judge’s question, “What were you doing at the time of the incident?” This information is frequently of a working nature. For example, when asked what she was doing when a man was murdered by a gunshot, a woman from the Paduan countryside recalls hearing the gunshot “precisely last All Saints’ Day on 1st November, when I was on the doorstep of my house at about 10 p.m. to tend to my fowl which were outside”. As a result, our project will focus on incidental information rather than the trial issue, which would otherwise over-report the sources (e.g. accidental criminal actions) or the bureaucratic-administrative activities related to the process. These sources can also reveal command verbs (one person ordering another to do something). Criminal sources allow us to grasp dimensions and aspects of mobility that are difficult to detect based on other sources such as censuses, status animarum, parish registers, marriage trials, as short distance movements (such as going to rural or urban markets to carry out specific activities) or medium-long temporary displacements like the seasonal migrations of mountaineers (Arru, Ramella, 2003). The use of criminal sources would make it possible to verify the episodic clues obtained from notarial sources or other documentation and quantify the percentage of women within migratory flows and mobility phenomena for a long time characterised as predominantly male.
Criminal court sources have already been qualitatively used in other works (for Italy, see Niccoli 2000). A broader concept of labour, namely a qualitative/linguistic analysis and a quantitative analysis, will be used as a result of a new method (verb-oriented) to retrieve comparable data. The experience already acquired from judicial sources (Caracausi 2008, 2017) will allow us to collect and coordinate the work of research fellows and research assistants. While the judicial records will be the main source of the project, we aim to use other types of sources, such as petitions advanced to the police by idle children’s parents, which include a plethora of incidental information about labour practices and the investment of time by the plaintiffs, defendants and witnesses. Business archives, mainly business correspondence, can provide data on the wide range of actors with whom merchants’ families interacted, including references to the type of activity carried out by the senders or third parties. Those sources and others, such as notarial and fiscal records already collected and digitised by members of the research units, could open up exciting possibilities for comparison with the trial sources, highlighting any differences in terms of how the verb-oriented methodology is applied and the results that can be achieved (Agren 2017).
The research unit in Padova will focus its research on the Veneto area (Padova and Treviso), Tuscany (Prato), Piedmont, and the Kingdom of Naples.
The Verona research unit will focus its investigation on the Veneto area and the Trentino.
The research unit of the University of Urbino Carlo Bo will focus on the Marche Region, in Central Italy (Pesaro and Urbino).