¿Activos desde cuándo? La edad de acceso al mercado de trabajo en la España del siglo XVIII

Using as a source the individual declarations of the Cadaster of Ensenada (1751-1753), this working paper proposes the age of ten years as the mean age at which children entered the labor market in 18th century Spain. This age could be used to calculate women’s and men’s participation rates in future works. La Mancha was a large proto-industrial region, providing Madrid, but also other cities and the colonies, with consumption goods, mostly textiles. These domestic manufactures originated a massive demand for women’s work. This productive structure explains why girls started working at a much younger age than boys, were schooled in sewing schools rather than in elementary schools, and had much lower literacy rates even a century later. Understanding and counting the widespread work done by girls and women in textiles suggest that the productive structure of pre-industrial Spain was, like in most of Europe, rather different to the traditional image of an economy based on agriculture and shepherding. In 18th century rural Spain, women and girls were massively employed in manufacturing, and taking this into account should change our vision of pre-industrial economies