Reconsidering Women's Labor Force Participation Rates in Eighteenth-Century Turin

Abstract

This study presents initial estimates of women's labor force participation rates in preindustrial Turin. According to the population census of 1802, married women's participation rates were conspicuously low compared with the rates of unmarried women and widows and therefore deserve additional investigation. First, the study points out the value of a methodological approach based on the use of nonprincipal breadwinner-oriented sources, such as registers of applicants for poor relief. Here, all members of the family were encouraged to declare their occupations and activities in some detail in order to demonstrate concrete contribution to the survival of the family. Finally, the study discusses the occupational patterns of women employed as servants and as artisans and laborers in silk manufacturing. This highlights the crucial role played by migration flows and by women's access to skilled or low-qualified jobs in determining the extent of women's participation in preindustrial Turin's labor market.

Keywords:

• Female labor force participation
• women's work
• male-breadwinner family
• labor market segmentation
• economic history
• Italy

JEL Codes:

• J2
• N01
• N33

Notes

1. The “tithe” – originally equivalent to one-tenth of the harvest – was a contribution asked from the parishioners in order to support the church and the priests.

2. From the sixteenth century on, Turin and the Piedmont were part of the Dukedom of Savoy. After the conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession, and as a consequence of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), the Dukedom of Savoy first became the Kingdom of Sicily and then, in 1720, the Kingdom of Sardinia.

3. The original collection is Municipal Archives of Turin (ASCT), coll. XII, Statistica della popolazione 1714–93, vol. 57–158.

4. Between 1799 and 1815, Napoleon carried out a major reform of the French public administration with the aim of creating a pyramidal and centralized nation. His collaborators enacted the Civil Code, which reformed family law and organized France into departments, many of which carried out economic and demographic surveys. During his rule, Napoleonic armies conquered the Italian and the Iberian peninsulas and extended the reforms to these territories.

5. During the eighteenth century, in Turin, only wealthy families, aristocracy, and institutions owned palaces and houses. In contrast, most families rented a room or some rooms in these houses.

6. ASCT, coll. XII, Censimento del 1802, vol. 173–8.

7. For a discussion about methodology see Maria Carla Lamberti (2002b).

8. According to the registers of the Ospedale di Carità, children over 14 years of age were considered capable of earning their living.

9. We classified as “housewives” women who declared, “I take care of my family/of my house.”

10. Indeed, as previously explained, the census forms were filled out by the families themselves or by the owner of the house in which the family lived.

11. The sample is based on the records of the central quarters of the city.

12. The sample is based on the records of the central quarters of the city (ASCT, Censimento del 1857).

13. This was in accordance with the image of “the deserving poor,” which was very common in Old Regime societies (Jean-Pierre Gutton 1971; Olwen H. Hufton 1974).

14. ASCT, Ospedale di Carità, cat. VI, Libri delle Informazioni per i ricoveri, vol. 40, f. 470.

15. ASCT, Ospedale di Carità, cat. VI, Libri delle Informazioni per i ricoveri, vol. 49, f. 340.

16. I refer here to two samples collected by students for their graduation thesis at the Department of Economic History at the University of Turin. I organized and standardized the samples in a unique database.

17. For a discussion of the importance of ideological and institutional factors in restricting women's work in nineteenth-century England, see Sarah Horrell and Jane Humphries(1995) and Jane Humphries (2010).

18. This is a feature of the urban Italian model, as also observed in other research. In Reggio Emilia in 1708, for example, women servants over age 30 accounted for 56 percent of all servants; in Rome in 1765, in the parish of San Damaso, they made up 48 percent (Arru 1992).

19. Percentages are calculated based on the total population of women servants registered in the 1802 census – excluding those of unknown age and unknown marital status.

20. According to the marriage acts of the Napoleonic age (1802–13; ASCT, Atti di matrimonio 1802–13, vol. 1–16).

21. Women in Turin were officially excluded from guilds, with the exception of the taffeta weavers and button-makers and generally with the exception of daughters and widows of masters. This meant that although they were skilled, women artisans – and especially wives – were never seen as real workers; as a consequence, the probability of their work not being recorded in official records was high.