Search

Copyright of Economic History Research / Investigaciones de Historia Económica is the property of Asociacion Espanola de Historia Economica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Today as in the past, most often crises take people by surprise. This fact has recently provoked strong criticism of the ability of an economic theory to predict crises, to understand their course and to establish solutions to mitigate their effects. History can thus serve as a reservoir of facts and experiences, and the use of a broad chronological perspective has been recently highlighted as essential to providing a wider, comparative knowledge of past crises. Recent economic historiography has highlighted the importance of studying financial and commercial crises alongside agrarian and demographic crises, as well as questioning specific aspects of these shocks. Another important dimension stressed by recent historical studies is the importance of recognising that crises in the past occurred against a background in which uncertainty was the norm. In societies that experienced various forms of ordinary uncertainty (linked for example to the 'dead' season in food or textile production), crises constitute peaks of exceptional uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Spain experienced growing social instability. The worsening working conditions stimulated social conflict and the rise of the labour movement. In this context, the first voices in favour of state intervention in conflicts between capital and labour arose among the reformist intellectual elite. One of the first social policy measures undertaken by the state was the creation, in 1883, of the Comisión de Reformas Sociales (Commission for Social Reforms, CRS) as a consultative and advisory institution of the government on social issues. Under the influence of positivist methods of empirical sociology, the commission’s first initiative was to conduct a survey with the objective of undertaking a detailed diagnosis of the living conditions of the working population. Changing gender relations in the family and labour market, especially the conflicts over the use of women’s time, was one of the central questions in this survey. Thus, its results allow us to analyse both the discourses – by social reformers and other social groups – and the social practices of women at work in different sectors and in different parts of Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the keynote address presented at the Second Conference of the European Labour History Network, concerning the reconstruction of female labour force participation (FLFP) in Catalonia, Spain, as well as remaining parts of Europe. Topics discussed in keynote include debate on the impact of industrialization on women's work and life; female activity and economic development; reconstructing female activity rates in Dutch and Spanish industrialization.

The stem family was the predominant family in Catalonia in all social groups. Proto-industrialization took place in a context in which this type of family prevailed. In many areas, the man worked in the fields and women and other family members were engaged in manual spinning. In other cases, they were weavers who also farmed. With the advent of factories, there was a transfer of this well-trained labour supply to the factories. The stem family (consisting of at least two generations, unmarried children, and numerous women) allowed the circulation of domestic work between women within the same family and the consolidation of an abundant labour supply and cheap labour that allowed for the feminization of the textile industry with successive technological changes. Female labour trajectories, therefore, were not affected by marriage or motherhood, because the family had enough older women to deal with the domestic work of young mothers. Hence, the family type, and not the family life cycle is the (independent) variable that best explains the female labour supply. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study aims to reconstruct women's activity rates in the fourteen leading textile areas of Catalonia, which represented 20 percent of the Catalan textile labor force in the first third of the twentieth century. This contribution proposes to review explanations offered by neoclassical labor economics with regard to the determinants of women's labor participation. It assumes that some of these hypotheses stem from the frequent under reporting of women's activity, particularly those who are married with children. Nominative linkage techniques have been used to correct the underregistration of women's activity in the Enumerator Books with information from the Labor Census from each village. Descriptive as well as analytical statistics provide new estimates of women's activity rates for those villages and fresh interpretations on the labor supply behavior of women through the life cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at studies which highlight how, in the first phase of expansion of the industrial system in Catalonia, Spain, the greater harshness of industrial work and reproductive burdens led married women to keep their jobs right up to the moment when their wages could be replaced by their children's. They could then devote their time to the non-remunerated domestic tasks that were considered more important than income. Therefore, women's work changed throughout the family life-cycle, depending mostly on the ratio of active/inactive family members. From the mid-19th-century to the first third of the 20th century, Barcelona maintained a diversified and flexible demand for female labor. European historiography has gathered evidence suggesting that employment strategies also changed on the opportunities available to women in the labor market, and on cultural, ideological and institutional factors. The author argues that more research is needed into what underlies the differing intensities with which working-class families resorted to married women and child labor in various places in Catalonia.