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- Title
Women's work and structural change: occupational structure in eighteenth‐century Spain.
- Authors
Sarasua, Carmen
- Abstract
This article uses the declarations of householders in the Cadaster of Ensenada (1750–5) to calculate labour participation rates for women and men from 22 localities in inland Spain. The article establishes the actual levels of women's market activity, which are much higher than commonly assumed. This unique source also makes it possible to analyse the region's occupational structure. Due to the labour‐intensive character of manufacturing work, the abundant supply of cheap labour, the diffusion of cottage industries, and the demand for commodities from internal and colonial markets, a large portion of the region's population worked in manufactures in the eighteenth century. This finding challenges standard interpretations of the Spanish economy at this time as mostly agricultural, which rely on sources that exclude women workers. Most workers in the manufacturing sector were women, and their market activity was concentrated in textile manufacturing. Once women are included in the analyses, the industrial share of employment follows a U‐shaped trajectory from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century. The article concludes that the standard interpretation of structural change, based solely on empirical evidence for male workers, gives a misleading picture of when, where, why, and how structural change occurred.
- Subjects
WOMEN employees; WOMEN'S employment; OCCUPATIONAL structure; 18TH century Spanish history; MANUFACTURING industries; COTTAGE industries; TEXTILE industry; WOMEN textile workers
- Publication
Economic History Review, 2019, Vol 72, Issue 2, p481
- ISSN
0013-0117
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/ehr.12733