Reconsidering the Southern European Model: Marital Status, Women's Work and Labour Relations in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Portugal

Abstract

Challenging current ideas in mainstream scholarship on differences between female labour force participation in southern and north-western Europe and their impact on economic development, this article shows that in Portugal, neither marriage nor widowhood prevented women from participating in the labour market of mid-eighteenth-century. Our research demonstrates that marriage provided women with the resources they needed to work in various capacities in all economic sectors.This article also argues that single Portuguese women had an incentive to work and did so mostly as wage earners. Finally, the comparison of our dataset on female occupations from tax records with other European cases calls for a revision of the literature and the development of a more nuanced picture of the north-south divide.

NURSING BABIES TO FIGHT POVERTY: WAGES OF WET NURSES OF SPANISH FOUNDLING HOSPITALS IN THE 18THAND 19THCENTURIES

“…Regarding the second debate, De Moor and Van Zanden (2010) argue that women's employment, especially in domestic service, is associated with a delay in marriage age and a decline in the number of children. The «northern European marriage pattern», already pointed out by Hajnal (1965) and also recently identified in southern European countries (Ribeiro da Silva and Carvalhal 2020), would imply an increase in wages and a stimulus for growth. Horrell et al .…”