Though the actual work that men and women performed in the Renaissance economy was often very similar or the same, their relationship to work and work identities were very different. Male work rhythms and a man’s position in the economy were to a large degree determined by age, class, and training, with boys and men often moving as a group from one level of employment to the next. Female work rhythms were also determined by age and class, but even more so by individual biological and social events such as marriage, motherhood, and widowhood, all of which were experienced by women individually and over which they might have little control. Women often changed occupations several times during their lives or performed many different types ofjobs at once, so that their identification with any one occupation was not strong.
Women rarely received formal training in a trade, and during the Renaissance many occupations were professionalized, with the setting up of required amounts of formal training and a licensing procedure before one could claim an occupational title. Thus in the Middle Ages both male and female practitioners of medicine were often called physicians, but by the sixteenth century, despite the fact that some specializations within medicine such as gynecology and obstetrics remained the province of female midwives, only men who had attended university medical school could be called physicians. This professionalism trickled down to occupations that did not require university training; women might brew herbal remedies, but only men could use the title “apothecary.” Professionalization affected not only titles but also the fees people could charge for their services; a university-trained physician, for example, earned many times the annual salary of a female medical practitioner.
In the cities and the courts, a few women worked as painters, miniaturists, composers, musicians, singers, and printers. Many such women worked in the ateliers and shops of their fathers. Other women plied their trades as artists and composers under the auspices of a convent.
During the Renaissance, gender also became an important factor in separating what was considered skilled from what was considered unskilled work. Women were judged to be unfit for certain tasks, such as glass cutting, because they were too clumsy and “unskilled,” yet those same women made lace or silk thread jobs that required an even higher level of dexterity than glass cutting. The gendered notion of work meant that women’s work was valued less and generally paid less than men’s. All economies need both structure and flexibility, and during the early modern period these qualities became gender-identified: male labor provided the structure for work that was regulated, tied to a training process, and lifelong; female labor provided the flexibility for work that was discontinuous, alternately encouraged or suppressed, not linked to formal training, and generally badly paid. Women’s work was thus both marginal and irreplaceable.
Rural Areas
Despite enormous economic changes during the Renaissance, the vast majority of people in almost all parts of Europe continued to live in the countryside, producing agricultural products for their own use and for the use of their landlords. Agricultural tasks were highly, though not completely, gender-specific, though exactly which tasks were regarded as female and which as male varied widely throughout Europe. These gender divisions were partly the result of physical differences, with men generally doing tasks that required a great deal of upper body strength, such as cutting grain with a scythe; they were partly the result of women’s greater responsibility for child care, so that women carried out tasks closer to the house, which could be more easily interrupted for nursing or tending children; they were partly the result of cultural beliefs, so that women in parts of Norway, for example, sowed all grain because people felt this would ensure a bigger harvest. Whatever their source, gender divisions meant that the proper functioning of a rural household required at least one adult male and one adult female; remarriage after the death of a spouse was much faster in the countryside than in the cities.
Women’s labor changed as new types of crops and agricultural products were introduced and as agriculture became more specialized. Women in parts of Italy, for example, tended and harvested olive trees and grapevines, and carried out most of the tasks associated with the production of silk: gathering leaves from mulberry trees, raising the silk cocoons, and processing cocoons into raw silk by reeling and spinning. Women also worked as day laborers in agriculture, and from wage regulations we can see that female agricultural laborers were paid about half of what men were and were given less and poorer-quality food.
Women also found work in rural areas in nonagricultural tasks, particularly in mining, and by the sixteenth century in domestic industry. In mining, women carried ore, wood, and salt, sorted and washed ore, and prepared charcoal briquettes for use in smelting. In domestic industry, they produced wool, linen, and later cotton thread or cloth (or cloth that was a mixture of these), and they were hired by capitalist investors as part of a household or as an individual. In areas of Europe where whole households were hired, domestic industry often broke down gender divisions, for men, women, and children who were old enough all worked at the same tasks; labor became a more important economic commodity than property, which led to earlier marriage, weaker parental control over children, and more power to women in family decision making. In parts of Europe where women were hired as individuals, men’s agricultural tasks were more highly paid, so men continued to make most of the decisions in the family, and there was little change in women’s status.
Urban Areas
In the cities, domestic service was probably the largest source of employment for women throughout the period. Girls might begin service as young as seven or eight, traveling from their home village to a nearby town. Cities also offered other types of service employment on a daily or short-term basis. Many of these jobs were viewed as extensions of a woman’s functions and tasks in the home— cleaning, cooking, laundering, caring for children and old people, nursing the sick, preparing bodies for burial, mourning the dead. Women combined part-time work in laundering and sewing with selling sex for money— what later became known as prostitution— which many cities tried to regulate, setting up official city brothels with rules for the women
And their customers. In the late fifteenth century, cities began to limit brothel residents’ freedom of movement and require them to wear clothing that would mark them as “dishonorable.” Such restrictions increased dramatically after the Protestant Reformation, with most Protestant and then Catholic cities in Northern Europe closing their municipal brothels, while major Italian cities favored regulation over suppression.
Women were important providers of health care and charity. The hospitals, orphanages, and infirmaries run by the Catholic Church were largely staffed by women, as were the similar secular institutions that many cities set up beginning in the fifteenth century. Women continued to dominate midwifery in most parts of Europe, the one female occupation whose practitioners developed a sense of work identity nearly as strong as that of men. In many cities women distributed poor relief to families in their own homes, with the city governments relying on women’s knowledge of their own neighborhoods to prevent fraud.
The city marketplace, the economic as well as geographic center of most cities, was filled with women; along with rural women with their agricultural and animal products were city women with sausage, pretzels, meat pies, cookies, candles, soap, and wooden implements that they had made. Women sold fresh and salted fish that their husbands had caught or that they had purchased from fishermen, game and fowl they had bought from hunters, and imported food items such as oranges, and by the seventeenth century tea and coffee bought from international merchants. Pawnbrokers sold used clothing and household articles, and female money changers exchanged travelers’ money for the type of coinage accepted in the city. Because there was no way to preserve food easily, women or their female servants had to shop every day, and the marketplace was where they met their neighbors, exchanged information, and talked over recent events.
Women also ran small retail establishments throughout the city. They made beer, mead, and hard cider, and ran taverns and inns to dispense their beverages and provide sleeping quarters for those too poor to stay in the more established inns. These taverns also provided employment for serving women, though there were perils with such a job; inn servants in France were the one group of women denied the right to sue their seducer if they became pregnant. Women’s work as producers and distributors of alcohol changed somewhat during the period, for they often left or were pushed out of certain occupations, such as brewing beer, once these became larger scale, requiring more capital investment but also producing more profit.
Domestic industry provided employment for increasing numbers of urban as well as rural women, particularly in spinning. Renaissance techniques of cloth production necessitated up to twenty carders and spinners per weaver, so that cloth centers like Florence, Augsburg, or Antwerp could keep many people employed. The identification of women and spinning became very strong in the early modern period, and by the seventeenth century unmarried women in England came to be called spinsters.
Women increasingly turned to spinning as other employment avenues were closed to them, particularly in craft guilds, which continued to dominate the production and distribution of most products into the eighteenth cen-tury. There were a few all-female guilds in cities with highly specialized economies, such as Cologne, Paris, and Rouen, but in general the guilds were male organizations and followed the male life cycle. One became an apprentice at puberty, became a journeyman four to ten years later, traveled around learning from a number of masters, then settled down, married, opened one’s own shop, and worked at the same craft full-time until one died or got too old to work any longer. Women fit into guilds much more informally, largely through their relationship to a master as his wife, daughter, or domestic servant. Masters’ widows ran shops after the death of their husbands and were expected to pay all guild fees, though they could not participate in running the guild. Even this informal participation began to be restricted in the fifteenth century on the continent, however, and women largely lost this relatively high-status work opportunity.
The Renaissance has been viewed as a time of tremendous economic change, with the expansion of commercial capitalism, the beginning of domestic production, and the creation of a world market system because of European colonization. When we evaluate women’s economic role during this period, however, we find that continuities outweigh the changes. Women were increasingly pushed out of craft guilds, but they had only rarely been full members in the first place. They took over new types of agricultural tasks, but continued to be paid half of what men were paid no matter what types of work they did. They dominated the urban marketplace, but only rarely were able to amass much profit. Women’s legal dependence on fathers or husbands, their unequal access to family resources, and their inability to receive formally acknowledged training had adversely affected their economic position in the Middle Ages and would continue to do so through the Renaissance and into the twentieth (or in many cases twenty-first) century. The vast majority of women’s work continued to be low status, badly paid or unpaid, frequently shifting, and perceived as marginal, but essential to the operation of all rural and urban economies. These were also qualities that marked the work of many men in the Renaissance, but they had the comfort of knowing that, however dismal their actual working conditions, their labor was valued higher than that of the women who worked beside them.
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
See also Anguissola, Sofonisba; Art and Women; Fontana, Lavinia; Inglis, Esther; the subheadings Home Care and Women Practitioners; Professionalization of Medicine and Women Practitioners; Legal Injunctions against Women
Practitioners; Hospital Administration and Nursing as Careers for Women; Childbirth and Reproductive Knowledge; Midwives and Licensing; and The Practice of Pharmacolgy and Laywomen (under Medicine and Women); Music and Women; Nelli, Plautilla; Printers, the Book Trade, and Women; Strozzi, Barbara.
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World History
