Articles for DWF
Books reviewed by DWF
Articles for DWF
TILLY Louise - SCOTT Joan, Emancipation or Integration: women's work in Nineteenth
Century Europe, 1976, Year I, n. 4, pp. 11-50
Views differ amongst historians on the history of women's work. All too often research is pursued from a particular standpoint, with scant regard for the historical data. For example William Goode, who maintains that women started work outside the home on a massive scale only towards the middle and end of the nineteenth century, is convinced that structural changes are the consequence of ideological change. Frederick Engels on the other hand, held that ideological changes, changes in custom, followed on changes in the economic structure.
Scott and Tìlly maintain that there is no hard and fast rule for the relationship between structural changes and changes in ideology, behaviour, custom. The authors show that the values set upon women's work outside the home are typical of the peasant world. Girls who formed part of the domestic rural unit, the household, were sent out to work, either in the fields or as domestic servants in the neighbourhood.
Industrialisation brought little change in the
work done by women: they continued to go out to work as domestics, as workers
in cottage industry, or, more rarely, into factories. So for some time after
industrialisation the pre-industrial situation continued for the peasant woman
throughout Europe. Her work still remained "feminine" work-dressmaking,
domestic work etc. etc.
Scott and Tilly also describe the progressive deterioration for women from a
situation of economic equality which they had enjoyed within the peasant household
to a situation of economic dependence typical of bourgeois society.
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Books reviewed by DWF
TILLY L.A. - SCOTT J.W., Donne, lavoro e famiglia nell'evoluzione della società
capitalistica, Bari, De Donato, 1981
rev. by A.B., 1981, n. 16, pp. 160-161