Only unpaid labour force? Women's and girls' work and property in family business in early modern Italy

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the nature of the women's contribution in family businesses in eighteenth-century Turin. Specifically, it discusses the reliability of the notion of unpaid work; it suggests that the latter is a too ambiguous concept and that some kind of distinction which clarifies the role played by each family member should be introduced. Economic and labour relationships between the partners or between the head of the household and other women of the family network were complicated by the presence of the female's personal property, and especially by the dowry. Married women invested in the family business their dowry or, alternatively, they used it in order to set up and run an independent economic activity or to buy a set of tools that enabled them to work autonomously. Widows (mothers or mothers-in-law) did the same. Women therefore were workers and owners at the same time. Their economic contribution to the household was based on an intricate mixture of physical work and property, and precisely for this reason they cannot be considered as an unpaid labour force. Finally, the paper shows that property gave the women the bargaining power necessary to negotiate their position in the household or to obtain some kind of help or support.