Saving male time, exploiting female labour: The woman as the “driving force” in premodern society, 1700–1914

Abstract

Research on the division of male and female labor during pre-industrial and industrial times has overlooked the significance of the bearing and carrying work done by women in a variety of occupations. The history of the labor force in and around the city of Liege in Belgium provides numerous examples of how women – almost like beasts of burden – carried over long distances bread, coal, and the finished products of domestic industry. In industrializing Liege, they not only took care of the above-ground conveyancing in coal mining, but also often pulled barges through canals and rivers. These activities by women, badly remunerated, eliminated the need for men in these tasks, and thus saved entrepreneurs both time and money. The nuanced investigation of work time, family time, and the division of labor among the sexes, as carried out by Tamara Hareven, has sensitized researchers to questions of this kind for understanding the nature of work in the pre-modern times as well as in the process of industrialization.

Keywords:

• Female labor
• Bearing and carrying
• Liege
• Belgium
• Industrialization

Notes

1 An exception however is Hilden, Patricia P., Women, Work, and Politics. Belgium 1830–1914, Oxford, 1993, who devotes several passages to the woman-carriers, pp. 108–111.

2 Lawsuit of sorcery, middle of the 17th century, preserved in the Archives of the Musée de la Vie Wallonne in Liège.

3 See the same observation for Scotland in 1823: the wife conveys the manure to the field in a creel, tends the corn, reaps it, hoes the potatoes, digs them out, carries the whole home on her back; when bearing the creel she is also engaged in spinning with the distaff. Quoted by Berg (1985), p. 143.

4 Musée de la Vie Wallonne, photographic archives, A.14414.

5 Archives de l'Etat à Liège, Fonds français, Préfecture, inventory of 1800–1804: Ans-Glain (205/6), Montegnée (229/13).

6 The law of 13 December 1889, which concerned the work of women and children, prohibited from 1892 underground work for girls of less than 21 years. The law on mines of June 5, 1911, forbade underground work for all women. Chlepner, 1956, pp. 215–216).

7 Archives de la ville de Liège, Ordre public, Première partie, dossier X, b–11, 15, 16, 23, 41.