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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]

Economic Theory has recently revised during last years the following two basic ideas on the economic working of families: i) family income is the sum of the individual income of each of its members (income pooling); and ii) all family members living in the household have equal access to family resources. Unequal access to family resources among women and men, as well as among elderly, adults and children, is now understood as an input. For instance, women ate less food and of worst quality than men. But it is also understood as an output: women had poorer health, higher epidemic mortality and were smaller than men because they had received less food and poorer medical care. Inequalities in intra-family consumption are currently drawing the attention of academics and international agencies but it is not yet in the Economic History agenda. In this paper we look at some of the resources consumed by Spanish families in the 19th century: food, alcoholic beverages, clothes and shoes. Medical topographies, our main source, suggest that gender inequality structured access to family resources, and that this inequality had a strong impact on the health and well-being of family members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.