Becoming Mainstream? Placing Women's Work in Economic History

Women’s work is a useful vantage point to understand the evolution of Women’s and Gender or Feminist History, as well as the differences between these and Social and Economic History. This paper is intended as a reflection on how women’s work has evolved as a historical subject, and to what extent it represents the transformations of our field. Important contributions to the history of women’s work had been made when the post 1960s wave of feminism arrived, of which Women’s History as an academic field would be part of. Beginning by Alice Clark’s Working life of women in the seventeenth century, published in 1919. Work was wage work for these first authors, whose main contribution was probably to write about all women, showing the common ground all they shared, paving the way for our modern concept of gender. The paper draws on my own research on 18th century women’s work and participation rates in Spain, and discusses four ideas on women’s work that have been widespread in scholarship until recently: women’s work as unskilled, women’s domestic work as for family consumption and not for the market; women’s work not possible to know due to lack of historical sources; women’s work informal, seasonal, and thus wages irrelevant for families’ wellbeing.