Making a Living, Making a Difference

Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society

Edited by Maria Ågren

A pioneering work of digital humanities, this work is based on an innovative methodology of data collection.
Offers new perspectives on gender and everyday work in early modern society, including household, unpaid, and hidden labor.
Sheds light on the economic contributions of women in society not based on occupational titles.
Offers quantitative analysis alongside stories about ordinary people and their predicaments.
Digital methodology has been presented at conferences internationally.
Not a traditional edited volume, this is a collectively written book by the Gender and Work Project Group at Uppsala University.

Making a Living, Making a Difference

Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society

Edited by Maria Ågren

Description

What do people do all day? What did women and men do to make a living in early modern Europe, and what did their work mean? As this book shows, the meanings depended both on the worker and on the context.

With an innovative analytic method that is yoked to a specially-built database of source materials, this book revises many received opinions about the history of gender and work in Europe. The applied verb-oriented method finds the 'work verbs' that appear incidentally in a wide variety of early modern sources and then analyzes the context in which they appear. By tying information technologies and computer-assisted analysis to the analytic powers - both quantitative and qualitative - of professional historians, the method gets much closer to a participatory observation of the micro-patterns of early modern life than was once believed possible.

It directly addresses a number of broad problems often debated by historians of gender and early modern Europe. First, it discusses the problem of assessing more accurately the incidence, character and division of work. Second, it analyzes the configurations of work and human difference. Third, it deals with the extent to which work practices created notions of difference - gender difference but also other forms of difference - and, conversely, to what extent work practices contributed to notions of sameness and gender convergence. Finally, it studies the impact of processes of change. Drawing on sources from Sweden, the authors show the importance of multiple employment, the openness of early modern households, the significance of marriage and marital status, the gendered nature of specific tasks, and the ways in which state formation and commercialization were entangled in people's everyday lives.

Making a Living, Making a Difference

Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society

Edited by Maria Ågren

Acknowledgments
Contributors
Introduction: Making a Living, Making a Difference- Maria ÅÅgren
Chapter 1: The Diversity of Work- Jonas Lindström, Rosemarie Fiebranz, and Göran Rydén
Chapter 2: Working Together- Dag Lindström, Rosemarie Fiebranz, Jonas Lindström, Jan Mispelaere, and Göran Rydén
Chapter 3: Marriage and Work: Intertwined Sources of Agency and Authority- Sofia Ling, Karin Hassan Jansson, Marie Lennersand, Christopher Pihl, and Maria Ågren
Chapter 4: Less than Ideal? Making a Living Before and Outside Marriage- Hanna Östholm and Cristina Prytz
Chapter 5: Constitutive Tasks: Performances of Hierarchy and Identity- Karin Hassan Jansson, Rosemarie Fiebranz, and Ann-Catrin Östman
Chapter 6: The Dark Side of the Ubiquity of Work: Vulnerability and Destitution among the Elderly- Erik Lindberg, Benny Jacobsson, and Sofia Ling
Chapter 7: Gender, Work, and the Fiscal-Military State- Marie Lennersand, Jan Mispelaere, Christopher Pihl, and Maria Ågren
Chapter 8: Conclusion- Maria Ågren
Appendix
Bibliography
Index

Making a Living, Making a Difference

Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society

Edited by Maria Ågren

Author Information

Edited by Maria Ågren, Professor of History, Uppsala University

Maria Ågren is Professor of History at Uppsala University. She is the author of numerous works, including Domestic Secrets. Women and Property in Sweden, 1600-1857.

Contributors:

Maria Ågren- Uppsala University
Rosemarie Fiebranz- Uppsala University
Benny Jacobsson, PhD, Stockholm University
Karin Hassan Jansson- Uppsala University
Marie Lennersand- Swedish National Archives
Erik Lindberg- Uppsala University
Dag Lindström- Uppsala University
Jonas Lindström- Uppsala University
Sofia Ling- PhD, Uppsala University
Jan Mispelaere- PhD, Uppsala University
Hanna Östholm- PhD, Uppsala University
Ann-Catrin Östman- PhD, Åbo Akademi, Finland.
Christopher Pihl- PhD, Uppsala University
Cristina Prytz- Manchester Metropolitan University.
Göran Rydén- Uppsala University

Making a Living, Making a Difference

Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society

Edited by Maria Ågren

Reviews and Awards

"By shedding light on work and gender in a relatively poorly known kingdom that was a major power in the early modern period, this book makes a valuable contribution to the comparative study of early modern women." - Eleanor Hubbard, Early Modern Women