Early modern Europe was predominantly rural and agriculture was the most common form of production. Yet women’s contribution to agricultural work is relatively neglected in studies of women’s work and remains an area of discussion and disagreement among historians. This chapter sets out to tackle misconceptions around women’s agricultural work. It does so first by critically examining the main areas for debate; secondly by offering a survey of women’s work in different parts of Europe; and finally through two detailed case studies (of Norway and south-west England). The case studies not only highlight women’s contribution to agricultural work in detail but also suggest a range of research approaches to uncovering women’s work. We find that women’s work in agriculture was often substantial and was varied and adaptable. For instance, in coastal Norway and some mountainous regions women did the majority of agricultural work because men were absent working elsewhere; in eastern Europe women’s labour was as important as men’s; in south-west England women contributed about a third of labour required in agriculture; while in some economies, such as central Spain in the eighteenth-century, women were largely absent from agricultural work because they could earn more from rural textile production.

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.

In Chapter 4 we see how Europe’s women were central to urban life: within their families, as workers in production and retail, and as members of parishes. Yet their opportunities were also curtailed, as they were denied the full enjoyment of civic life. The contours of such denial differed across Europe: in the north, women often enjoyed a sort of diminished citizenship, and in the south of France they were more visible in the courts of law. Yet, like Jews and others, they were a group apart in many ways, deemed unsuitable for the exercise of public authority, for their voices to be heard, or for their claims to be made in person in urban courts. Their agency is palpable within neighbourhoods, in the running of workshops, and in the support of family businesses, especially in widowhood. They were creative in forging religious lifestyles even against parental choices and social conventions. But, like ‘strangers’, they were vulnerable too, forced to be dependent in many ways. Like all social interactions, theirs varied by class and age, but it is useful nonetheless to recognise that strangerhood can be experienced even within the town of one’s birth, the place called home.