Household economies, social norms and practices of unpaid market work in Europe from the sixteenth century to the present

These days, the issue of unpaid family work immediately evokes the world of care and home -keeping, -help, and -schooling. Unpaid work has become synonymous with care. Years of research and activist demands have resulted in an increasingly open recognition of these domestic tasks in social science research, at the institutional level, and among the public1. From this perspective the factoring of these activities in the GDP of certain countries is a sure sign of a positive reversal in perception (Folbre & Wagman, 1993). However, this equation has produced an unexpected side effect: a relatively cursory consideration of unpaid market work within family productive activities.

The goal of this special issue is to begin to clear the way for a historical approach to a topic that is barely addressed in the sociology and anthropology of gender and family and quite neglected by historians, by attempting to observe it across a broad swath of western and southern Europe2.

1. Tracking the unpaid market work: a historical perspective

The history of the European family has recently developed considerably, in particular with respect to the intersections between family ties, internal hierarchies and the allocation of tasks within the family. Important research on the household economy has emerged and immensely enriched historical knowledge about the contribution of women and children to the revenue of the domestic productive unit (Ågren & Erickson, 2005). While we knew how important the work of single women and widows was for the early modern and industrial revolution economies, we now know a lot more about the paid work of married women (van Nederveen Meerkerk & Schmidt, 2008; Schmidt, 2009; Schmidt & van Nederveen Meerkerk, 2012).

However, the surface of an important part of the latter’s productive activities has barely been scratched. The issue of unpaid work in family workshops is regularly raised, but much ground remains to be covered on these productive units, which have dominated both the early modern era and a large part of the modern and contemporary era in southern and northern Europe (Berg, 1993; Hall & Davidoff, 1987, 279–315). Alongside married women, sons, daughters, apprentices, sisters, brothers, parents and domestics of the head of the family provided unpaid work for production that was decidedly market-oriented, both in urban areas and a number of rural areas, where household production partly fed into sometimes very extensive channels of commerce. This is not to say that historians have completely avoided this issue altogether. It must be recognized, however, that it has never been subjected to scrutiny. This is due, on the one hand, to a problem with documentation and sources, and on the other hand with the definition of the notion of unpaid work in purely economic terms.

Despite the existence of numerous qualitative sources, it remains difficult to this day to identify sources for assessing the number of these workers and the remunerations, or lack thereof, of family workers and helpers involved in production for the market. There are no work contracts for spouses, there are some in the special case of children who work with their parents, and there are many for apprentices, demonstrating extremely diverse and varied work situations. If the research is broadened to include various testimonies of economic contributions that household members make to the family business, the record of certain key moments in the family’s history can be more revealing. We are thinking in particular of times when the household loses some of its members: when children demand to be independent or leave the business to create their own, when the old enter hospice care or a retirement home, when widows seek entry into their husband’s corporation or fight for recognition of their pension rights, and when spouses separate or divorce. These are the times to more or less metaphorically “do the books” and discuss, evaluate and meticulously recap each person’s contributions. It remains difficult for both the social actors and researchers to clearly quantify them, but it is precisely the criteria used to define these materially quantified and evaluated perceptions of contribution that we consider to be of interest (Cavallo, 2007; Groppi, 2002, 2010).

In addition to the problem of “invisibility in the statistical sources” of work that is generally done in domestic spaces, away from the view of public and professional bodies, this first series of articles begins to offer answers thanks to the use of sources that had previously been used very little in the history of work and the domestic economy. In addition to the increase in qualitative sources in the wake of research done on the middle and merchant classes, legal sources and employment litigation, tax records, social surveys of private and public observers, and for the contemporary era, bankruptcies, instances of divorce and oral sources have provided new ways to keep track of what happens “off the record” (Humphries & Sarasúa, 2012).

From a theoretical perspective, we have the benefit of a favourable situation with many economists and sociologists interested in the work of women. Considerable progress has been made in capturing this activity that eludes the clearly demarcated category of salaried work. As Lisa Philipps puts it, unpaid labour can be defined as the contribution of “family members in bread-winning activities that are the official responsibility of only one person in the household” (Philipps, 2008, 37). Of course, this particular form of labour raises an analytical difficulty to the extent that the distinction between the economic contribution and its sociological dimension is artificial. The involvement of family members in household production for the market implies that economic, sociological and even “moral” issues are legally and anthropologically inseparable, and strictly tied to the various historical contexts in which the family activities unfold. In other words, the goal is to investigate the various forms of resource allocation and distribution of welfare within the family (Ermisch, 2003), and more largely, what economic ethnologists call “active kinship” (Weber, 2005).

The lack of a clear distinction between the economic, sociological and anthropological spheres in the notion of unpaid market labour thus conceived underscores the importance of a historical approach to the household, which we would like to investigate from the early modern era to today since some of its characteristics have endured. Family obligations and the systematic blurring of lines between family resources and business resources create particular productive configurations that go far beyond the boundaries of the modern era. In France, for example, the increase in salaried work for spouses in rural areas reflects a recent and relatively late transformation of rural society in this country. And it is no coincidence that the requirement to declare the status of an unpaid collaborating spouse in the crafts and trade sectors was enacted in the new millennium (Martini, 2014). Moreover, as Céline Bessière’s economic ethnological work shows, this does not preclude a complete absence of collaboration from salaried spouses outside of the family business in the household's activities; gender dynamics are at play here, with more wives than husbands in the role of collaborator on the one hand, and the “problematic” position of the male partner on the other.

2. Gender and intergenerational relations between workshop and family

The particular area of unpaid work in family business lies at the intersection of the history of the family and the history of labour, and dovetails with more recent themes explored in this historiography, which is keen on dialogue with the other social sciences.

The work taking place in workshops, small businesses and family stores started attracting growing interest in several social sciences after the 1970s crisis showed the resilience and vitality of employment in these small scale unities of production. Renewed interest in family business in all its forms, from the history of great family dynasties to that of urban corporate elites and of the craft industry and shops, has also helped to enrich our approach, especially in its focus on the relationship between emotional and legal ties (Martini, 1998). Historians of the petty bourgeoisie have rightly emphasized the interweaving of feelings and interests between spouses who jointly run a booth or small workshop. Even if the study of large groups continues to take centre stage, a flourishing literature is increasingly looking not only at workshops of the end of the Middle Ages and the modern era, but also at those of the contemporary era. The field of industrial management and economics has particularly focused on how roles are distributed in small family operations, and how companies are bequeathed (Crossick & Haupt, 1984, 1995; Daumas, 2004; Jones & Rose, 1993). An interesting aspect that the literature on family businesses has shown is that the children – both boys and girls – and wives are most often salaried even if their roles are most often secondary in the company’s organization chart. Sometimes they voluntarily embrace this role, as Francesca Maria Cesaroni and Annalisa Sentuti have shown in interviews conducted with contemporary Italian businesses' owners and managers.

This persistence of subordinate forms of unpaid family collaboration is precisely a thematic focus of ours. Rather than attempt to be exhaustive we have opted to highlight a number of historiographical problems and milestones that are relevant to a specific issue that we have chosen to submit to intense scrutiny: the “moral” and “economic” links tying the relationships among members of the domestic production unit. The hypothesis we have proposed and started to explore here is that this is an enduring feature of the tension between moral and economic obligations. The automatic association between industrialization, the increase in salaried work for women and the drastic reduction in workshops, actually does not pan out in the industrial reality of a significant swath of southern and northern Europe. The industrial structures of Italy, Spain and France remain stubbornly fragmented (Colli, 2003), despite the fact that the industrialization process in these countries went hand in hand with establishing separation between the public and private spheres, adding an additional layer to the invisibility of the work of married women, especially in statistical sources (Burnette, 2008; Downs, 1995; Fauve-Chamoux, 2001; Folbre, 1991; Scott & Tilly, 1987, 104–145; Sharpe, 2000).

Family relationships are understood here, as suggested in the recent literature, in a very broad sense and include non-blood relations as well as resident and non-resident members participating in household work.

The extensive literature on apprenticeships and domestic service immediately raises the issue, throughout Europe and over a very long time period, of remuneration for these intricate figures: poorly paid and exploited workers, young people in training who in turn pay their masters, and household members whose status can progress to true integration under more or less explicit forms of adoption and fosterage3.

For these reasons, apprenticeship is a particular and, in some cases, a separate subject, given that apprentices most often are not strictly part of the family, and also because they are remunerated, either in money or in kind. However, for precisely the same reasons, because apprenticeships are governed – officially at least – by trade statutes and laws, and are often but not always subject to a written contract, they offer significant insight into economic relationships within the household4. The issue, for our research, is the significance and the recipient of remuneration, because in some situations and trades it is the apprentice who pays the master, whereas in others it is the master who pays the apprentice. This is obviously a huge difference that points to completely opposite meanings: in the first case the idea is to remunerate the master for the teaching he imparts, and in the second it is to use young workers in training: as normal workforce. In some cases, the contract shifts between the two and the apprentices, or rather their families pay the master during the first few years of the contract. The master then commits to paying the young worker once s/he has learned the trade. Rarely has recent research centred on the issue of the apprentices’ “salary”; rather, it has focused on the link between apprenticeship and the trades, and on its evolution as these institutions have changed throughout the modern era, emphasizing the transition between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the development of a freer labour market (Epstein, 1998; Ogilvie, 2004; Wallis, 2008). It nonetheless appears that the types of remuneration of both apprentices and masters varied greatly in the early modern era and depended on variables such as the age or origin of the apprentices, the type of work and raw materials involved, and whether or not the apprentice benefited from family support (Bellavitis, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c; Laudani, 2006; Minns & Wallis, 2012, 2014). Roman legal sources from the seventeenth century show, for instance, that an apprentice paid by his master could be mercilessly exploited, while an apprentice who paid his master enjoyed greater protection from bad treatment. Thus, it was considered an act of “charity” for a father to pay for his son to receive an apprenticeship. But they also show that the assimilation of apprentices into family members in the rhetoric of workshop masters often became a pretext to disregard the remuneration requirements stipulated in the contracts (Ago, 1998).

An important starting point of reflection thus revolves around intergenerational relations within production units. These relations have also been central to traditional debates on proto-industry and “industrialisation before industrialisation” (Kriedte, Medick, & Schlumbom, 1981; Ogilvie & Cerman, 1996). They have provided the basis for raising the issue of the role of household members, and especially of women and children, in production for the market, and for attempting to measure its consequences on processes of economic and demographic growth5. While this appears too rigid a model today, there is no question it has created new fields of research on the link between household and family member participation in production and the economic development of many European regions such as, for example, England and the Netherlands. The same link became central and foundational to the equally stimulating and much discussed “industrious revolution” model (De Vries, 2008; Sarti, 2010; Schmidt, 2009; Schmidt & van Nederveen Meerkerk, 2012; van Nederveen Meerkerk & Schmidt, 2008).

One decisive contribution to understanding the issue of family work comes from the research of gender historians focusing on the contribution of spouses to the household economy based on different European legal traditions: the economic contributions made by the spouses at the time of marriage, the conclusion of a marriage contract that mitigates the custom, the pooling or separation of the spouses’ property, and benefits that the written laws or contracts provide for a surviving spouse, and especially for a widow6. Such subjects are at the heart of our inquiry and of the articles that were chosen for this special issue of The History of the Family. Indeed, research on the early modern and the modern era shows that collaboration between husband and wife essentially occurs in petty trades and craft workshops (Crossick & Haupt, 1995; Hall & Davidoff, 1987; van den Heuvel & van Nederveen Meerkerk, 2008; and Ariadne Schmidt’s article in this issue). It is at the level of the “middling sort” that the spouse’s participation in economic activity is both widespread and very difficult to record. While legislative debates and union demands have tabled the issue of the “non-remuneration” of spouses who are part of family businesses in the contemporary era, the very concept of “unpaid work” only partially encompasses the complexity of the situations and relationships it implies7. All the more so, especially under Roman law’s dowry system, as the economic contribution of the spouse is invested in the commercial or crafts enterprise, as Beatrice Zucca Micheletto shows in her article. In the Venetian mercantile society of the sixteenth century, it was normal for women’s dowries to become part of the capital of the “fraterna” – the company created by the father and his sons, or by the brothers (Bellavitis, 2008). The economic and productive activities of married women can indeed be considered an emerging issue in recent research, which must contend with series of difficulties in terms of both sources (for more on this, see Jane Whittle’s article, which “experimentally” uses inventories after death for this purpose) and legal systems (Simonton & Montenach, 2013). In this context, a comparison at the European level including southern countries and northern countries is a worthy goal that we seek to pursue in our research.

For the contemporary period, Céline Bessière and Francesca Maria Cesaroni-Annalisa Sentuti’s research on the marital economy and more broadly the domestic economy of still active small and medium size family businesses shows the importance of the spouse’s or children’s contribution, which can involve unexpected dynamics that shed light on the family business’ operations in both periods of growth and development and periods of crisis.

Finally, the area of care – the organisation of the home into different forms of domesticity – is obviously not unrelated to that of unpaid productive work given that the boundary between a spouse’s work for the home and for the market is difficult to establish, especially in workshops based in the family home8. Going back and forth between the weaving loom and the kitchen to prepare a meal for members of the domestic workshop was a common practice in a range of European textile workshops till the mid-20^th century. And in more recent times, contrary to a widely held belief among sociologists, recent historical research has shown that Italians who were supposedly housewives in the 1950s and 1960s actually worked at home, especially in textile and sewing trades, and often asked children and other household members to “give them a hand” in reconciling professional activities and domestic tasks (Badino, 2008; Blim, 2001)9.

More widely, the complementarity between the house’s domestic and professional tasks conducted at home necessitates adopting an open definition of unpaid market work. In this context, these forms of work can be related to those highlighted by the vast literature focusing on exploitation and dependence, beginning with the work of feminist economists in the 1970s and 1980s (Delphy, 1983; Delphy & Leonard, 1992). In this area of overlap between care and unpaid market work, it would probably prove interesting to pursue a new lead: the historical analysis of time use patterns, as was done for British housekeepers at the beginning of the nineteenth century thanks to journals and account books (Hall & Davidoff, 1987; Vickery, 1998). Time use patterns allow to go beyond standard economic indicators (Floro, Grown, & Elson, 2011; Grown, Floro, & Elson, 2010). The study of daily schedules enables a detailed exploration of various family members’ contributions, which vary depending on the historical and economic context and the family’s revenues. Thus, they help highlight the strong connection between unpaid work and the (often small or very small) size of a business.

This special issue focuses on the intersection of these four areas. It considers the strength of family ties in domestic production activities and on their long-term effects, which explains why a figure deeply rooted in history seems so familiar today in the family community: the spouse, most often a mother, who serves as collaborating unpaid partner to the artisan or shopkeeper.

To raise the issue of the persistence of unpaid work is also to bring up the issue of defining it over a long period of time. Does “unpaid” have the same meaning across different historical contexts? Can such work really be defined as unpaid? While there is no direct monetary recognition it can in some cases create debts, even though they are deferred. Furthermore, the work is often compensated by benefits in kind, presents, and a better living standard for the household. But, at the same time, it creates also some forms of dependence, for instance on social security and welfare toward the head of the family (Kessler-Harris, 1990). As we have stressed above, feminist economists have shown that unpaid work is located somewhere between the household and the market, challenging any artificial separation between the two.

But while they may be similar, unpaid work is different from unpaid home-keeping, -help, and -schooling. In the craft and shop-keeping sectors of interest here, the social actors are involved in activities that are undeniably, and clearly perceived, as market-oriented (Philipps, 2008). Yet these activities, companies and sole proprietorships, do not legally and socially belong to them and they do not collect attendant benefits. There is no question that dependence and exploitation exist in certain phases in the life of the business, and especially during its creation, but in some situations the business also allows women in particular to come into contact with the non-domestic world and to acquire professional skills, albeit informally. Thus conflicts that emerge at times of crisis can lead break down, both of the household and/or the business.

Sooner or later, institutions are required to settle conflicts or establish rights. Where then do institutions stand in relation to these economic and social practices and how do they intervene to shape the practices as they see fit? To what extent do actors’ attempts to circumvent, adjust and resist the institutions distort the goals and challenge the very existence of these institutions? Several of the papers presented here give hints to answers to these questions in unexpected ways. Institutions are often more innovative than social practices.

A very recent example will serve to conclude this introduction and open a wider research agenda. During the pivotal 1970–1980 period, social law reform, directly affecting work relations in a couple’s or family business, went hand in hand with family law reform in most European countries, virtually all of which underwent significant reform in the mid-1970s. While they were extraordinarily innovative, these reforms encountered obvious and difficult barriers to overcome in the practices of actors who were loath to think, let alone act in accordance with their economic individuality within the family’s collective production (Martini, 2014). The survival of unpaid work is at stake as long as market principles and family principles become entangled in the family workshop. One of the specificities of unpaid work is the difficulty in drawing out the principles that guide it and make it such a fascinating subject for family historians and ethnologists to unravel.

Notes

^1. The following stands out from the now extensive literature: Elson (2007); for France, Weber (2005); for Italy, Sarti (2010); Rapport de la commission sur la mesure des performances économiques et du progrès social (Commission «Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi») 14 september 2009 (Report of the commission on the measurement of economic performance et social progress http://www.stiglitz-sen-fitoussi.fr/documents/rapport_anglais.pdf, 12/12/2012); Razavi (2012) publication accessed online on November 10, 2012, http://www.unrisd.org/__80256b3c005bccf9.nsf/0/2dbe6a93350a7783c12573240036d5a0?OpenDocument&panel = relatedinformation&Click = 

^2. The articles in this issue of The History of the Family are part of a multiannual research programme on “Family work, family workshops and unpaid work in Europe (15^th–21^st centuries)” that was also supported by the École Française de Rome. Two conferences were organised at the Paris Diderot (September 2011) and Rouen (Ocotber 2012) universities and a panel presented at the European Social Science History Conference in Glasgow (April 2012). We would like to thank all the participants at these meetings for their suggestions and helpful comments and particularly Maria Ågren, Mathieu Arnoux, Amy Erickson, Francisco García González, Sibylle Gollac, Fabia Guillén, Claire Lemercier, Corine Maitte, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, Liliane Pérez, Raffaella Sarti, Carmen Sarasúa and Heide Wunder.

^3. On apprenticeship and family history, there is an extensive literature, especially about England, see, for example, Krausman Ben-Amos (1994); for France, see Pellegrin (1993); for Italy, Bellavitis (2006b); for a recent overview on the history of apprenticeship in Europe and in Japan, see, de Munck, Kaplan, and Soly (2007).

^4. The issue of apprenticeship has been discussed in the Paris and Rouen meetings and will be extensively treated in our next conference (Ecole Française de Rome, 23–24 October 2014).

^5. For recent analysis on proto-industry in relation to women’s and family history see Lehners (2003); Ogilvie and Cerman (1996).

^6. For England see: Erickson (1993); McIntosh (2005); Phillips (2006); for Germany, Ogilvie (2003); for Italian States, Bellavitis (2008), Chabot (2011); Groppi (1994); Zucca Micheletto (2014); for Flanders, Howell (1998); for the Netherlands, Schmidt (2010); for Sweden, Ågren (2009); for the consequences of the legal status of English women on contracts see Muldrew (2003), on capitalism see Erickson (2005), on business history see Honeyman (2007); for an European perspective on marriage and the economy of the household, see Ågren and Erickson (2005), Carmichael, De Moor, and van Zanden (2011) and Béaur (2011), see Beattie and Stevens (2013).

^7. This is the conclusion that Heide Wunder reached in her communication during the Paris 7 workshop in 2011.

^8. For some examples see, for Italy, Franceschi (2001); for England, Whittle (2005); for Portugal, Abreu-Ferreira (2000); for conflicting identities of worker and wife in France, see Crowston (2001).

^9. Statistics are based on the discursive construction of the male breadwinner and the dependent housewife (Folbre, 1991; Frader, 2008); for a comparative analysis of the different interpretations of the breadwinner in relation to the origins of the welfare state in Great Britain and France see Pedersen (1993).