Making a Living, Making a Difference
Making a Living, Making a Difference
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Summary
Making a Living, Making a Difference offers an eye-opening perspective on what men and women in early modern European society did all day. Based on an innovative method and a large data collection of everyday activities, the authors show the ways in which gender and work were linked in early modern society by revealing household, unpaid, and hidden, as well as paid labor.
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Making a Living, Making a Difference by Maria Gren
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.
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 *
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.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780190240622 |
| ISBN 10 | 0190240628 |
| Title | Making a Living, Making a Difference |
| Author | Maria Ãgren |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press Inc |
| Year published | 2017-01-05 |
| Number of pages | 274 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |