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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]