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Women's work in rural England 1500-1700: a new methodological approach

Women's work in rural England 1500-1700: a new methodological approach

Jane Whittle, University of Exeter, UK

The Leverhulme Trust is funding this project from 2015-2018. It uses the records of local courts (criminal and ecclesiastical) to collect evidence of work activities (i.e. specific work tasks undertaken by specific people), in an attempt to replicate something like a time-use study using historical evidence. We have compiled a database of 4300 work activities from south-west England, mostly dating from 1550-1700. These reveal the gender division of labour, but also many other aspects of work in this period, such as the overall distribution of different types of work, and the location and timing of work activities. We are currently writing up a series of articles discussing our approach, methodology and results.

We also collected information about occupational descriptors, although as other studies have found, these are very rare for women but commonly provided for men. This allows us to compare male occupational descriptors with work tasks, to reveal the range of work activities undertaken by men with particular occupations.

We have also compared our findings with similar studies of work tasks from Sweden (led by Maria Agren at Uppsala University) and SW German (by Sheilagh Ogilvie). The patterns found in the gender division of labour are quite similar in all three countries.

In the future we would like to expand on this research, with at the very least, similar sized samples of work tasks from (a) northern England and (b) arable farming areas in eastern/midland England, to explore regional differences. A larger sample would also allow us to collect more data on important aspects of work for which we only have small useable datasets at the moment, such as time-use, the age of workers, and comparisons with occupational descriptors.

We are not interested in occupational coding or mapping, as they are not appropriate to this type of data. However, we have similar infrastructure needs such as good parish boundary maps, information on the geographical distribution of the population, and list of towns with population sizes. In addition, we are very keen to explore how occupational data and work task data intersect, and what each approach can add to the other.