DOHaD research in economics finds inequitable health and labour market outcomes but lacks insight into structural factors that contribute to disparities. In practice, social relations like racism, sexism, and ableism can translate into inequitable ‘returns to investment’ in ‘human capital’. DOHaD literature in economics could contribute more to understanding the determinants of health. It is limited by a narrow focus on molecular factors and the decontextualised use of demographic variables, which should be interpreted as proxies for hierarchical power relations. Excluding systems of oppression from analyses renders inequity-generating social structures less visible instead of clarifying their unjust consequences. Egalitarian economic approaches can address the failure to adequately integrate social structures with historically grounded, socially informed analyses. This chapter demonstrates how by tracing the devaluation of reproductive labour in economic thought to the reduction of women and girls to their reproductive roles in the DOHaD literature. The marginalisation of women’s labour and of women’s economic research contributes to the dehumanising instrumentalisation of women in orthodox economic research in DOHaD. The analysis reveals risks for women and girls, linking DOHaD literature to debates about ’foetal personhood’, women’s autonomy, and gender inequity.

This introductory chapter makes a case for a gender-inclusive approach to the history of work. The ‘early modern’ period witnessed unprecedented growth in parts of Europe and elsewhere, linked both to the global redistribution of resources and to new ways of organizing labour. This chapter surveys the rich scholarship on the history of women’s work in Europe and its implications for narratives of macroeconomic change and assessments of economic performance. It also discusses the insights brought by feminist economics to the conceptualization of work and highlights new methodologies for analysing divisions of labour in the past. Finally, it lays out arguments for why women’s work was as important as men’s in producing change.

Care work is both a pre-condition for economic activity and a form of economic activity in its own right. Its extent, character and distribution has varied from place to place and over time in ways which suggest it is erroneous to assume that care was either a constant or somehow external to the economy. Indeed, rather than presuming that, historically, women’s work was determined by and shaped around the care burden, there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that the organization of care in early modern Europe was designed to enable women’s (as well as men’s) productive work. This chapter explores the variation in the extent and character of the care burden and the complex distribution of care between familial, commercial, voluntary and state-sponsored domains. Such variation and complexity suggest that women’s – and men’s – contribution of unpaid care work was anything but constant. The burgeoning market for paid care services in early modern Europe allows assessment of the monetary value of unpaid care and the ways in which the allocation of care was part of family strategies to maximize married women’s productive work. Care, therefore, is a necessary variable for the assessment of early modern economic performance.